UCLA's Early Years, 1919-1938 a Dissertation

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Something New Under the Los Angeles Sun: UCLA’s Early Years, 1919-1938

A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in Education

William Charles Purdy

2016

William Charles Purdy

2016

ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION

Something New Under the Los Angeles Sun: UCLA’s Early Years, 1919-1938

William Charles Purdy

Doctor of Philosophy in Education

University of California, Los Angeles, 2016

Professor Patricia M. McDonough, Chair

Here we argue that UCLA’s first two decades show it to be a unique historical case: it was a state normal school that quickly became a research university, not just a teaching college, a branch campus quickly achieving parity with its parent institution, the first elite research university comprised of a large majority of women students, the first major public research university founded in the twentieth century, the first public/private partnership, even if silent, to plan a public university alongside a private commercial village or college town, and one of the first colleges to be used as a prime filming site for

Hollywood film studios using it to portray a typical American college. Unlike most, if not all, histories of specific universities, much of the study is devoted to the broader historical

ii education context in which UCLA is embedded, and therefore, the popular new public high schools in Los Angeles, UCLA’s predecessors and later competitors in the private sector such as Caltech, USC, Pomona, Occidental, and new junior (later, community) colleges are discussed and examined here. This study is not limited to the standard academic schedule and is not restricted to UCLA’s campus, but also concerns the 1918 flu pandemic, rise of summer session programs, and shows the silent real estate development partnership between public and private sector actors when UCLA moved to its new campus in Westwood.

UCLA moved its campus in the 1920s from a few miles north of USC on

Vermont Avenue all the way to then pastoral Westwood. Its historical identity was fixed then, as a flagship public university set in the city, but not really of the city. (USC, conversely, embraced its role as the city's university during this period, even though a private institution). Neighboring Westwood Village was the first privately planned college town, nestled among the tony neighborhoods of Bel Air to the north and Holmby

Hills to the east. Located in such an exclusive area, UCLA was from the start a difficult environment for students of color and students coming from low-income backgrounds, but still offered great opportunities to many Southern Californians who had until then lacked a local public sector choice for college, and later, for graduate school. UCLA’s early institutional saga was cast in power and prestige, with the ambitions of its faculty and students matching those of its rapidly growing host city.

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The dissertation of William Charles Purdy is approved.

Stephen A. Aron

Robert A. Rhodes

Linda J. Sax

Patricia M. McDonough, Committee Chair

University of California, Los Angeles

2016

To Avalon

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part I

Chapter One: Introduction 2

Chapter Two: Historical Sketch of Los Angeles 33

Chapter Three: Historical Background of California Public Education 53

Chapter Four: History of Private Higher Education in Los Angeles 95

Part II

Chapter Five: Summer Sessions in Southern California 122

Chapter Six: World War I and the 1919 Flu Pandemic 138

Chapter Seven: College Films in the 1920s and 1930s 167

Part III

Chapter Eight: The Young Life of a New University 190

Chapter Nine: The Once and Future Majority: Women Students at UCLA 230

Chapter Ten: UCLA’s Move to Westwood 255

Epilogue 292

Conclusion 295

Plates 300

Bibliography 329

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This work would not have been possible without the love and support of my wife

Kier and daughter Avalon.

UCLA’s Department of Special Collections and University Archives are full of information that has only just begun to be explored, and it is thanks to former University

Archivist Charlotte Brown that I had the chance to work as a graduate student archivist and to explore from that inside perspective the riches buried in the university’s holdings.

The Los Angeles Central Public Library is the source of the photographs contemplated for use in this study, and this library has been a tremendous complement to UCLA as I have forged through the study. I am grateful to all the help provided by so many different librarians, archivists, and other staff persons at these libraries.

The idea for this study came from my master’s thesis “The History of Higher

Education in the Western United States,” where a more focused study on UCLA’s early history appeared to me as just too vital an L.A. story to ignore. Art Cohen chaired that master’s committee, with Pat McDonough and Rob Rhoads serving as well. Several years later, Pat welcomed me back to UCLA, agreeing to serve as my doctoral advisor, and she changed my career and life. There is no finer scholar, mentor, or person than Pat

McDonough, and I am fortunate to have worked and studied under her guidance. At

UCLA’s year-long 299 seminar, Mitch Chang and Walter Allen helped me develop the core concepts explored in this dissertation, and I learned from Linda Sax the powerful effects of college on students. As Rick Wagoner’s volunteer teaching assistant in ED 209,

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History of Higher Education, I explored the national context of the historical issues presented here. Stephen Aron has welcomed me for years to the Western History

Workshop meetings he conducts at the Autry Museum of the American West, and I have learned a great deal from these seminars and from his professional model generally.

While not working with her directly, Sylvia Hurtado has always been very supportive of my work and a wonderful mentor figure in her leadership role at the Higher Education

Research Institute. Finally, I learned so much, albeit from a distance as I did not work with them directly, from Sandy Astin and the late Helen Astin, and I cherish the small time I spent with the late Bob Clark; in the few moments I spent carrying his books out to his car at the Faculty Center, I learned more than from reading many thick volumes. This work grows directly from his brilliant and lasting scholarly example.

If the sinews of war are infinite money, than the sinews of graduate education are at least a steady flow of funds, and I could not have completed this work without working at Holland & Knight, LLP’s Los Angeles office. My office there is a stone’s throw from the original location of the Los Angeles State Normal School, now the site of the Los

Angeles Central Public Library, and our building is O’Melveny & Myers’ headquarters, the law firm that played such a strong supporting role in UCLA’s early history. The work assigned to me by Nick Zotos and Gilda Russell, and my association with my co-workers

Susan Thompson and Sally Somers has kept me sharp in a private sector kind of way; there simply is no way to wander off into abstract academic clouds when the work of a major law firm keeps one rooted to reality.

While I have studied higher education for many years, I knew nothing about it, not really, until I taught with UCLA’s Scandinavian Section. As a Teaching Fellow and

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Summer Instructor, I lived the life of a humanities scholar, and it is terribly sweet, difficult, and delightful. Kim LaPalm, Anna Blomster, Chip Robinson, Tim Tangherlini,

Arne Lunde, Pat Wen, Kendra Willson, and Kimberly Ball have been wonderful colleagues, friends, and mentors, and I would be blind to the true life of the university without the knowledge they imparted to me. I carry Hans Christian Andersen, Henrik

Ibsen, Isak Dinesen, August Strindberg, Edvard Munch, Edvard Grieg, Jean Sibelius,

Amalie Skram, and Pär Lagerkvist in my heart now, all good friends and companions.

Many thanks to the administrative offices of the Royce Humanities Group and the

Graduate School of Education & Information Studies, especially to Kerry Allen at Royce and to Amy Gershon in Moore Hall. I never could have finished my dissertation and defended it successfully without your help. I owe you both a very deep debt of gratitude.

Much of this work was presented as various research papers at meetings of the

American Educational Research Association, the Association for the Study of Higher

Education, and the History of Education Society, and the comments and critiques of the discussants for these presentations have improved this work tremendously. The late Les

Goodchild, Dot Finnegan, Amy Wells Dolan, Eileen Tamura, and John Thelin have been especially helpful and generous in their time and effort at these conference meetings. In the early stages of this project, Richard Longstreth was very kind to offer me his views on Westwood Village as a real estate development, and his work on Los Angeles has led me in highly useful directions, and I am very grateful to him.

I come from a family of teachers, and acknowledge the great examples provided to me by my dad, Charles Purdy, sister, Heather Moskowitz, and my Uncle Bob Purdy.

Wherever they teach, they are held in the highest esteem, and I am proud to have joined their company as an educator.

Finally, many thanks to my friends and colleagues Ray Franke, Shannon

Calderone, Nathan Durdella, Ryan Gildersleeve, Kimberly Griffin, Uma Jayakumar,

Victor Saenz, Marcella Cueller, Rican Vue, Tyson Marsh, Tracy Buenavista, Christopher

Newman, Nolan Cabrera, Lucy Arellano, Chiara Paz, Pam Schuetz, Kevin Fosnacht,

Katalin Szelényi, and Carrie Kisker, and everyone else in the Division of Higher

Education and Organizational Change. Working with you at UCLA has broadened my perspective and lightened my heart, and you all deserve a lot of credit for this project’s success. I respect and honor what you all do every day for our students.

VITA

WILLIAM CHARLES PURDY

EDUCATION

2003 M.A. Higher Education and Organizational Change, University of California, Los Angeles.

2000 J.D., Florida State University

1997 B.A., History and English, University of Florida

PUBLICATIONS

Franke, Ray, and William C. Purdy. Student Financial Aid in the United States. In Effects of higher education reforms change dynamics . Rotterdam: SensePublishers, 2012.

McDonough, Patricia M., Calderone, Shannon M., and Purdy, William C. State Grants and Their Effects on Students' College Choices. Western Interstate Commission for Higher Education (WICHE): Boulder, Colorado, 2007.

CONFERENCE PRESENTATIONS

Purdy, William C. The Conciliator in Chief: President Ford's Major Speeches on College Campuses . Paper to be presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Washington, D.C, 2016, April, upcoming.

Purdy, William C. John Wayne: College Dropout. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Washington, D.C., November 2014.

Purdy, William C. and Ray Franke. A Not So Distant Mirror for MOOCs: College Courses for Credit on Major American Television Networks in the 1950s and 1960s . Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Consortium for Higher Education Researchers, Rome, Italy, September 2014.

Purdy, William C. All Summer Long: The Vital Role Played by the Summer Session in the Historical Development of the University of California, Los Angeles, University of Hawai’i, and other Colleges on the Pacific Coast . Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, St. Louis, Missouri, November 2013.

Purdy, William C. Of Regents and Real Estate Agents: UCLA and Westwood Village's Early Years, 1925-1939. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, April 2012.

Purdy, William C. We are Family: Same-Sex Marriage and Married/Family Housing at Public Universities . Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New Orleans, Louisiana, April 2011.

Purdy, William C. Sunshine and Ivy: Hollywood Hits California Campuses, 1919-1941 . Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Indianapolis, Indiana, November 2010.

Franke, Ray & Purdy, William C. Effects of Student Financial Aid Policies in the United States and Implications for Europe . Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Consortium for Higher Education Researchers, Oslo, Norway, June 2010.

Purdy, William C. Soldiers, Scholars, Doctors, and the Great Flu of 1918. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, November 2009.

Purdy, William C. Hitting the Books, Hitting the Beach: Southern California Goes to College, 1919-1941. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the Association for the Study of Higher Education, Jacksonville, Florida, November 2008.

Purdy, William C. The Once and Future Majority: Women Students at Early UCLA, 1919-1941. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the History of Education Society, St. Petersburg, Florida, November 2008.

Purdy, William C. Not Always Angels but Sometimes Bruins: The People of Los Angeles and UCLA, 1919-1934. Paper presented at the Annual Meeting of the American Educational Research Association, New York, New York, March 2008.

COURSE INSTRUCTION AND OTHER TEACHING EXPERIENCE

University of California, Los Angeles

2015 (Fall) Italian 110 ─ Dante in English Translation. Special Reader.

2010-2015 Scandinavian 50 and 50W ─ Introduction to Scandinavian Literature and Culture. Teaching Fellow.

2012-2015 (Summer) Scandinavian 50W ─ Introduction to Scandinavian Literature and Culture. Instructor, Summer Session.

2015 (Winter) Scandinavian 98T and Education 98T ─ All the World’s a Classroom: Education in Scandinavian Literature . Instructor.

2014 (Fall) Scandinavian 40W ─ Heroic Journey in Northern Myth, Legend, and Epic . Teaching Fellow.

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PART I

Chapter 1: Introduction

To paraphrase the poet,

What has been will be again, what has been done will be done again; there is nothing new under the Los Angeles sun.

Is there anything of which one can say, “Look! This is something new?” It was here already, long ago; it was here before our time. 1

Yet here we examine what in the 1920s was a very new thing on the Los Angeles scene: a new, public university, a new campus, new students, all converging in a new metropolis. Looking back almost a century into the past, we can see many things foreshadowing events and trends that seem new today. The West Side of Los Angeles welcomes a new Metro train line that will connect downtown to Santa Monica, with a stop planned just south of Pico Boulevard. It is heralded as being a wonderful new commuter opportunity for UCLA students, just as the convenient Pacific street car line

(which ran down Santa Monica Boulevard in the 1920s) was touted as a reason for locating UCLA’s new campus in Westwood. The University of Southern California

(“USC”) is planning a major new residential, shopping, and entertainment district, a small college town to pair with its urban campus, inspired by Westwood Village—as

Westwood was intended to be. 2 This time, though, the university wants total control, unlike the tacit partnership between the University of California and the Janss Investment

1 Book of Eccelesiastes, 1:9, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Ecclesiastes%201&version=NIV 2 Larry Gordon, “USC unveiling plans for $650-million housing, retail complex,” http://www.latimes.com/local/education/la-me-usc-village-20140915-story.html . According to Gordon, the “new USC Village is to include living space for 2,700 undergraduate and graduate students in five-story residence halls, a large grocery store, a drugstore, a fitness center, restaurants and other shops.” 2

Company, which planned and operated Westwood Village from the 1930s to the 1950s.

Today, following terrorist attacks inspired by ISIS in Paris, France, and San Bernardino,

California, Muslim students face alienation and even threats of harm by the majority community 3; in the 1920s and 1930s, this applied to all non-White students, but especially, of course, to Japanese American students, who were removed from UCLA and interned in concentration camps in the spring of 1942.

The Immovable Institution in a City of Constant Motion

A great university is paradoxical in that it appears to stay ever rooted to one place—to the campus and to its ancient (or sometimes just ancient-looking) buildings.

Yet it causes movement, constant movement, like a sun forcing planets into motion, either into tight concentric circles or far out into the distant corners of career opportunity; a university draws people to it, then sends them hurtling away, or keeps locked them in close by. As the most prestigious American universities have grown internationally, their gravitational pull has grown too, so that UCLA now draws many students and even some professors from the farthest corners of the planet, as well as continuing to exert a strong pull on Southern California, its original constituency and its home.

The paradox of the immovable university causing constant motion grows sharper when we examine the history of UCLA, the first public university in a city that is known for what seems to be relentless and constant motion: Los Angeles, set in a spidery maze of freeways, busiest hub of international travel on the Pacific Coast, where you can see seemingly every car ever made driving on its streets, and where some of the finest food is served from trucks. Just like UCLA, Los Angeles pulled people to it, too, with frenetic

3 http://dailybruin.com/2015/12/07/submission-muslim-students-should-take-increased-safety-precautions/ . 3 advertising campaigns, cheap railroad fares, water diverted from distant valleys, the dredging of a massive artificial port, and like Athena planting a dream in a hero’s head,

Hollywood’s promise of a paradise portrayed on thousands of silver screens across the country. People moved to Los Angeles and came to UCLA for much the same reason—to pursue opportunity and to seek a better life. Yet, once in Los Angeles, social and actual physical movement was restricted for many by racial discrimination, and if not legally barred from attending UCLA, students of color were forced to overcome structural impediments, such as being routed into high schools that did not often send students to college, or even after having secured admission, not being able to live close to campus because of racially restrictive covenants. The socially upward movement promised by a great new public university was not freely available to all.

UCLA and the other major Southern California colleges and universities seem fixed in their spheres now, rooted both to their physical campuses and institutional missions. Like most colleges and universities, each institution promotes the idea of fixedness and timelessness, of antique wisdom transmitted through modern means on a glorious and eternal campus. A century ago, however, these schools were restless, often moving to different campuses or at least planning audacious moves, casting about in many different directions for new and more prestigious institutional missions. UCLA moved twice, always in search of a bigger location and higher prestige; even the

University of Southern California, anchored today in its campus close to downtown, sought to move around 1916 and 1917, and in the 1920s, little modest Occidental College sought to blow up its small liberal arts college mission into a massive city-spanning system.

If there is a Los Angeles corollary to the Bill of Rights, beyond freedom of speech, religion, press, and assembly, we have a freedom to move, whether literally on the roads or in our personal and professional aspirations. 4 As the first public university in this city of constant motion, UCLA promised greater mobility for the people of Southern

California, and it delivered this for many, especially if they were White and middle-class, during the years of this study. In the twenty-first century, the great freeways of Los

Angeles are clogged, Westwood Village often impassable, it grows harder for the middle class to make it, whether to UCLA or even to live in the city, and students of color still face difficulties in securing admission to UCLA. The free movement the city and its great university promise has been fettered. In this century, UCLA must help to get the people of Los Angeles moving again.

Purpose and Design of the Dissertation

Between World War I and World War II, UCLA was research-oriented, selective in its admission policies, not defining itself as an urban institution, as did the University of Southern California (“USC”), and nestled far to the west in what was then already a well-off area. UCLA has not significantly changed since.

The privatization of higher education, a shorthand term describing the ever lessening share of state expenditures for public colleges and universities, is a much discussed subject today. 5 During the last century, the proportion of college students

4 While not covered by the period of this study, along with all Japanese Americans on the West Coast, Japanese American students were moved (admittedly by the federal government and not by UCLA), in the spring of 1942 to internment camps. Sometimes the freedom to move also centers on the freedom not to move, too. 5 Privatization is perhaps defined best by Christopher Newfield: “Since no one wants to beat her head against a brick wall, most educational leaders have come to say that colleges and universities should adapt to the new political reality of a permanently downsized public sector. This has generally meant only one thing—replacing declining public money with increasing private funds. This shift from public to private 5 attending public institutions of higher education increased until in 1970 it reached 90 percent. The national dominance of the public sector hides its relatively recent historical appearance in Southern California, as shown in Table 1.

Table 1: California Higher Education Enrollment: Public and Private Headcount 1920-1990 6

Year Total Public Total Private Total Percentage Enrollment Enrollment Enrollment Public (%)

1920 18,850 9,063 27,913 67 1930 56,454 28,843 85,297 66 1940 127,654 30,263 157,917 81 1950 209,419 62,183 271,602 77 1960 491,017 75,967 566,984 87 1970 1,002,725 117,891 1,120,616 90 1980 1,639,647 156,564 1,796,211 91 1990 2,048,610 177,077 2,225,687 92

Public higher education (leading at minimum to a four-year bachelor’s degree) became available in Los Angeles in 1919 when the University of California created a southern branch campus. Accordingly, 1919 marks the nominal beginning of this history, not only for the date’s significance for higher education in Southern California, but because it was the first full year of peace after World War I. The war tested the commitment and ability of colleges and universities to assist the federal government’s war efforts, while struggling to maintain enrollments and preserve their curricula and their very identities as schools and not armed camps. 7 The study ends with UCLA being granted the ability to award graduate degrees in 1936, and with the end of Provost and

funding sometimes goes by the name ‘privatization.’” Christopher Newfield, Unmaking the Public University: the Forty Year Assault on the Middle Class (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 174. 6 John Aubrey Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education (Stanford University Press, 2000), 359. 7 Carol S. Gruber, Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America (New York: Columbia University Press, 1975). 6

Vice Chancellor Ernest Carroll Moore’s tenure. UCLA cut its major ties with its Normal

School past, and moved forward to become a major research university with an ever growing number of graduate departments.

UCLA is a historically distinctive university for several reasons. First, it was a state normal school that quickly became a research university, not just a teaching college;8 second, it was a branch campus that quickly achieved parity with its parent institution; third, it was the first elite research university comprised of a large majority of women students; fourth; it was the first major public research university founded in the twentieth century;9 fifth, it was the first case of a public/private sector real estate development plan, with the campus growing up alongside a planned urban village;10 it was also a "university on wheels,” one of the first commuter colleges during the early days of the automobile, and lastly, it filled a fictional role as a typical American college for movie studios and a national film going audience that loved stories about college life.11 Going to college as a route to economic and social advancement (and as a fun and popular thing to do) took hold during this period. 12 Focusing on UCLA and its local peers in the 1920s and 30s foreshadows the later shift from mass to universal education as it occurred after World War II and through the 1960s.

Historians studying a single University of California campus must confront one great obstacle: their subject is only one part of a statewide system of institutions.

Today, the University of California has a complex power-sharing arrangement between

8 Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005), 11. 9 Roger Geiger, To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 , New York: Oxford University Press, 1986; Levine, David O., The American College and the Culture of Aspiration, 1915-1940 (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1986), 82. 10 Richard A. Longstreth, Email with Author, September 23, 2009. 11 John R. Thelin, "Life and Learning in Southern California: Private Colleges in the Popular Culture," History of Education Quarterly 15 (1975): 111-117, 112. 12 Levine, 114. 7 the central authority (The Office of the President, located in Oakland, California) and the separate campuses. UCLA, as the first branch campus, led the way by its historical example. The tension between Berkeley and UCLA has been examined in general histories of the University of California, histories of the Berkeley campus, and in UCLA's own institutional histories, which mainly have been written by authors who lived through what they perceived as indignities Berkeley inflicted on UCLA.13 The distance of time has softened the hard edges of formerly fierce but often petty institutional rivalries, and assuaged Berkeley’s fears—specifically President Robert Gordon Sproul’s fears—that devoting resources to any branch would necessarily kill the trunk of the University of

California tree.

It is tempting to view the development of Californian colleges and universities through the prism of the famed 1960 California Master Plan for Higher Education, seeing a planned institutional destiny for schools when it was in fact improvised.14 Historical decisions and events leading to the Master Plan are viewed with the benefit of hindsight.

Today’s three-part system of higher education, (comprised of the University of

California, California State University, and California Community Colleges) is taken for granted as an obvious division and arrangement. Yet University of California students, professors, and administrators could not know at the beginning of the twentieth century that their one campus at Berkeley would sprout eight other branches. Junior colleges

13 Verne Stadtman, The University of California, 1868-1968 (New York: McGraw Hill Book Company, 1970); Clark Kerr, The Gold and the Blue: A Personal Memoir of the University of California, 1949-1967, Volume I: Academic Triumphs (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) ; Andrew Hamilton and John B. Jackson, UCLA On the Move During Fifty Golden Years, 1919-1969 (Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1969); California of the Southland: a History of the University of California at Los Angeles (Los Angeles: the University of California at Los Angeles Alumni Association, 1937); Marina Dundjerski, UCLA: The First Century , (Los Angeles, CA: Third Millennium Publishing Territory, 2011). 14 Center for the Study of Higher Education, "The History of the California Master Plan for Higher Education,,” http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~ucalhist/archives_exhibits/masterplan/index.html . 8 were still on the drawing board, and no plans existed yet to convert normal schools to universities. Institutional leaders lacked knowledge of the Master Planned future, and fought for funding, power, and prestige without thought to their place in some future pyramid. 15 In the 1920s and 1930s, UCLA struggled to attain equal rank with Berkeley, junior colleges battled for respect, space, and a doable set of missions, and private colleges struggled to survive the trials of the Great Depression and competition with state schools. In this period, educational institutions were malleable forms, and not just in higher education. Only after flirting with higher education missions did schools such as

Hollywood High School and Los Angeles High School jettison their thirteenth and fourteenth grades (junior colleges) and resign themselves to being “only” comprehensive high schools.

Amid this institutional upheaval—and in the 1933 Long Beach earthquake this took on literal meaning, as fifty Los Angeles-area public schools were heavily damaged 16 —Southern Californian students sought entry to college in greater numbers.

Local students usually wanted to attend local schools, and where one attended high school had a great bearing on one's choice of college. The growth of high schools, as will be shown specifically in Los Angeles, helped fuel the growth of UCLA, and guaranteed that it would not only grow but would grow swiftly.

Research Design

15 References to rivalries, competition, and resulting discord pervade the forerunner to the Master Plan. State Higher Education in California: Report of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Recommendations of the Commission of Seven (June 24, 1932) http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/archives_exhibits/masterplan/pre1960.html . 16 The Long Beach Earthquake of 1933 wrecked forty Los Angeles School District (LAUSD) buildings. Heumann, Leslie with Anne Doehne. "Historic Schools of the Los Angeles Unified School District." March 2002, available online at http://www.laschools.org/employee/design/fs-studies-and- reports/download/LAUSD_Presentation_March_2002.pdf?version_id=1895945 . 9

This study requires a research design that allows for students to be the units of study more so than institutions, yet which also highlights the unique and historically significant case of UCLA. Accordingly, this dissertation employs a design created by historians of higher education Lester Goodchild and Irene Huk specifically for use in historical studies of colleges and universities. Their design marks the boundaries of a research project’s scope, makes clear the scholar's intent, and presents the narrative’s main goals. Several questions are asked of a researcher in this framework, which is set forth below. 17

1. What is the investigative scope? a. Educationist investigative scope b. Integrative investigative scope c. Contextualist investigative scope

2. What analytic approach is to be employed?

Romantic School a. Promotional history b. Topical history c. Chronological history d. Chronological-topical history

Policy School e. Public policy history f. Organizational policy history g. Municipal policy history h. Financial policy history

Cultural School i. Architectural history j. Religious history k. Intellectual history l. Women’s history m. Local history n. Synthetic cultural history

3. How are the narrative's aims to be accomplished? a. Justificatory aim

17 Lester Goodchild and Irene Huk, “A Survey of American College Histories” in Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research , pgs. 201-290, 263. (New York: Agathon Press, 1990). 10

b. Descriptive aim c. Explanatory aim d. Interpretive aim

The scope of this study is integrative in that it is limited to a single institutional case (UCLA), rooted in the local social, political, economic, and educational environment in which it developed. UCLA’s relationships with its parent institution, state and local communities, feeder high schools, and students (and later, its graduates—today numbering over 300,000) are considered. This scope is therefore broader than an educationist view—which focuses on a single institution alone or one of its departments.

A contextualist view is also adopted here because contextualists do not consider one case but prefer studying many schools, colleges, or universities together. Many schools are examined in this dissertation, but UCLA claims the main focus. The integrative scope allows historians to tie institutional records, archives, student remembrances, and other sources to a broader social context, without adopting totally the global view required of the contextualist or the very narrow view of the educationist. The integrative approach grounds UCLA in its social-historical, regional context, allowing us, for example, to examine events long before the university’s founding when relevant.

The Romantic school offers tales of educational colossi springing from humble origins, which while useful as promotional histories, offer thin critical analyses.

Histories of universities are vulnerable to the twin weaknesses of the Romantic School: sentimentality and triumphalism, in which historians are tempted to find in the past auguries of a great future. Historians working in-house at universities are particularly vulnerable to these temptations. Historians of the Romantic School usually organize narratives based on arbitrary periods of time such as decades. A rough chronicle is often

11 the result, a sketch of events with little context provided. Any historian studying UCLA is influenced by this school, thanks to various photographs including early aerial shots of campus buildings which almost instantly became iconic monuments like Royce Hall and

Powell Hall.

Historians of the Policy School have reacted strongly against what they perceive as the Romantics’ too insular approach. The policy historians looked beyond campuses to state capitals, city halls, and marketplaces and banks. The Policy School analyzes broader contextual factors such as the influences of legislative acts, municipal bonds and real estate zoning, and private fundraising. No college is considered in isolation, but is connected to larger economic and political contexts. For example, this study takes into account some bills and bond measures relating to the Normal School and UCLA, racially exclusive real estate covenants in Westwood Village, and local communities’ hopes for growth through association with college campuses.

The Cultural School of college and university historians has offered works

“analyzing internal college developments from the archival, secondary, and monographic sources within the context of local, regional, and national perspectives.” 18 Campuses are linked to their social and cultural environments; they are unsealed from their historical vacuum and placed within the context of their times. Women and men assigned historical roles as students, faculty members, and administrators are liberated from these arbitrary designations, and may be considered in light of their assorted other identities.

When such studies are conducted properly, a complex university may be set more firmly in its historical context.

18 Goodchild and Huk, 265. 12

With regard to policy studies, a strict municipal policy approach has not been taken, even though one of the study’s aims is to link UCLA’s history to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles city agencies, mayors, and school districts are not “major actors in the narrative,” which is a requirement of a city-centered history. 19 UCLA had only indirect ties to the city government, and its leaders did not consider it a municipal, or even an urban institution; had they done so, UCLA might have joined the Association of Urban

Universities, which had been formed in 1915. A municipal policy approach would be useful for a history of Los Angeles area community colleges (then called junior colleges), which were operated by the city public school district and often located on high school campuses (or in the case of Los Angeles City College, located on UCLA’s old Vermont

Avenue campus). Yet community colleges are addressed only indirectly in this history, and so a municipal policy approach is not taken.

Goodchild and Huk’s contextual analytical structure has been chosen for this dissertation, which is a synthetic cultural history (although it borrows a chronological cast from the Romantic School and maintains strong influences from policy historians).

Different aspects of the cultural landscape are bound together purposefully. Materials concerning women’s history, local history, and architectural history, for example, are examined here in the pursuit of a greater historical understanding of early UCLA.

Goodchild and Huk do not specifically reference racial or ethnic history, but it is given careful attention in this study, as no history of higher education—especially one concerned with the rise of mass and then universal participation in higher education—can be considered comprehensive without discussing race, especially in Los Angeles, one of the most racially and ethnically diverse cities in the United States.

19 Ibid., 266. 13

Today, UCLA is a national, state, and local university, well known around the world, attracting thousands of applications from international students each year.20 Its missions address the needs of Los Angeles high school graduates, community college transfer students, and applicants from around the world. UCLA conducts research under federal contracts, performs public service programs in support of the state, and partners with local schools in the Los Angeles metropolitan area. 21 Even in 1919, UCLA began to assume these duties; therefore, its institutional history must also consider broader socio- cultural patterns.

Historiography/Review of Literature

This paper sits at a junction of several bodies of literature: histories of higher education, studies of the American West, Southern California, and Los Angeles, and sociological, economic, and psychological studies relating to higher education. The standard histories of higher education proceed from colonial times to the present, giving their greatest attention to the rise of various types of institutions: liberal arts colleges, research universities, and junior/community colleges, for example. 22 Most historians of higher education have not considered issues from a regional perspective; however, on some topics, such as coeducation of men and women, state universities, and the rise of community colleges, a few general histories acknowledge the special role of the western

20 16,636 out of 92,681 freshman applicants for Fall 2015 were international students (17.6 % of total). This number does not include 20,075 transfer applicants. http://www.aim.ucla.edu/admissions2.aspx . 21 UCLA began operating the UCLA Community School in 2009 in a partnership with the Los Angeles Unified School District: http://cs.gseis.ucla.edu/about/ . 22 Arthur M. Cohen and Carrie B. Kisker, The Shaping of American Higher Education (San Francisco: Josey Bass, 2009); Christopher Lucas, American Higher Education: A History (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006); Frederick Rudolph, The American College and University: A History ( Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 1962); John R. Thelin, A History of American Higher Education (2nd ed.) (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011); John S. Brubacher and Willis Rudy, Higher Education In Transition: a History of American Colleges and Universities (4th ed.) (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997). 14 states. 23 Higher Education in the American West , a volume of highly useful chapters on different aspects of the history of colleges in the region, has done much to promote the

West for further historical study.24 However, few histories of types of institutions, such as research universities,25 liberal arts colleges,26 and community colleges 27 provide any specific regional analyses concerning the Western states generally, or California or Los

Angeles in particular. Finally, histories of state systems of higher education do not provide detailed analyses of their sub regions. Histories of the University of California as a system devote much of their attention to Berkeley, and discuss other campuses primarily as offshoots of Berkeley.

The historiography of gender and American higher education begins with

Enlightenment era debates on coeducation, with the foremost work being Mary

Wollstonecraft’s 1791 essay, “A Vindication of the Rights of Women.” The earliest histories particularly provided attention to women's colleges in eastern states, especially

New England, and to state land grant universities in the Midwestern states. 28 In more

23 Rudolph, The American College and University ; Cohen, The Shaping of American Higher Education ; Thelin, A History of American Higher Education . William C. Purdy, “The History of Higher Education in the Western United States,” unpublished M.A. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 2003, the first monograph on the history of higher education in the Western United States, is also useful. 24 Higher Education in the American West , eds. Lester Goodchild, Richard W. Jonsen, Patty Limerick, & David A. Longanecker, (New York: Palgrave-MacMillan, 2014). 25 Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), Roger Geiger, Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities Since World War II , New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Geiger’s volume includes an entire chapter on the rise of UCLA following World War II, which is outside the period of this study, but fascinating to read. 26 Goodchild and Huk, 288. 27 Steven Brint and Jerome Karabel, The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989); Arthur M. Cohen, Florence B. Brawer, and Carrie B. Kisker, The American Community College , 6th ed. (San Francisco: Jossey Bass, 2013). 28 Thomas A. Woody, A History of Women's Education in the United States. 2 vols. (New York: Science Press, 1929); Mabel Newcomer, A Century of Higher Education for American Women (New York: Harper, 1959); Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990); Barbara M. Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women: a History of Women and Higher Education in America , (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985). Linda Eisenmann's edited volume The Historical Dictionary of Women's Education in the United States allows scholars an instant 15 recent years, historians have studied women students, faculty, and administrators at different types of institutions, such as normal schools, and different regions of the country, such as the interior West. 29 Several important studies have explored the lives of women students outside the classroom.30 Women students at the University of

California, Berkeley have been the subjects of several important books and articles. 31

Yet UCLA's women students, who ranged from one half to three-quarters of the student body from 1919 to 1941, have received less attention, though their presence was essential to the University of California’s success in Los Angeles.

If college was becoming more popular between the wars, its place in the zeitgeist was offered from an East Coast perspective. 32 In the period of this study, one quarter of

quick entry to many topics that receive scant notice in general histories, with useful bibliographies accompanying each entry. Eisenmann is also a key figure in women's higher education historiography, as she has published useful critiques of Solomon’s In the Company of Educated Women . See Linda Eisenmann, "Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher Education a Dozen Years After Barbara Solomon,” Harvard Educational Review 67 , (1997), 689-717; Linda Eisenmann, "Creating a Framework for Interpreting U.S. Women's Educational History: Lessons from Historical Lexiconography," History of Education 30(5) , (2001), 453-470. Single-sex college campuses’ physical designs were studied in Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-Century Beginnings to the 1930s (New York: Knopf, 1984). 29 Ogren, The American State Normal School ; Andrea G. Radke-Moss, Bright Epoch: Women and Coeducation in the American West (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2008). Radke-Moss studied the cases of Oregon Agricultural College (Corvallis); Iowa Agricultural College (Ames); University of Nebraska (Lincoln); and Utah Agricultural College (Logan), discussing women’s education at these land-grant institutions. 30 Charlotte Williams Conable, Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1977); Dorothy Gies McGuigan, A Dangerous Experiment: 100 Years of Women at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, MI: Center for the Continuing Education of Women, 1970); Ruth Bordin, Women at Michigan: The Dangerous Experiment,” 1870 to the Present (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Press, 1999); Rosalind Rosenberg, "The Limits of Access: The History of Coeducation in America," In Women and Higher Education: Essays from the Mount Holyoke College Sesquicentennial Symposia , ed. John Mack Faragher and Florence Howe, (New York: Norton, 1988); Geraldine J. Clifford, “Equally in View”: The University of California, its Women, and the Schools. Chapters in the History of the University of California Number Four, ed. Carroll Brentano, Sheldon Rothblatt (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995). 31 Lynn D. Gordon, Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era ; Geraldine J. Clifford, "Equally in View” ; Charles Dorn, "'A Woman's World': The University of California, Berkeley, During the Second World War ." History of Education Quarterly 48 (4) (Winter 2008), 534-564. 32 Helen L. Horowitz, Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987); C.B.T . Lee , The Campus Scene, 1900-1970: Changing Styles in Undergraduate Life (New York: David McKay Company, Inc., 1970). 16 all American novels that deal with college themes or which are set on college campuses take place at Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Columbia, and Dartmouth. 33 Similarly, most college films of the 1920s and 1930s, while filmed in southern California, took eastern campuses for their fictional settings. 34 Regardless of where movies were filmed, it may not have mattered, at least with respect to generating a genuine national portrait of college students’ lives. For example, Paula Fass found few national differences among collegians, including UCLA students, in her study of youth culture in the 1920s, The

Damned and the Beautiful .35

American colleges, unlike their European counterparts, have mainly developed in rural areas and in small towns and villages. Oxford and Cambridge, two English universities centered on residential colleges, had a great influence on the planning of early American colleges because colleges were founded early in the physical development of American cities. 36 Rapidly growing frontier cities, whether Chicago in the late nineteenth century, or Los Angeles in the twentieth, saw the value of universities in developing their regional power. 37 UCLA did not market itself as an urban university and physically moved twice, veering westward and always farther from downtown toward less developed land, and real estate developers followed closely, sensing profits amid the books and bell towers.

33 John R. Thelin and Christian Anderson, "Campus Life Revealed: Tracking Down the Rich Resources of American Collegiate Fiction." Journal of Higher Education , 80 , (1) , 409-419. 34 Wiley Umphlett, The Movies Go to College: Hollywood and the World of the College-Life Film (Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984); Kenneth W. Munden (Ed.), The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, 1921-1930, 1931-1940 (New York: R.R. Bowker, 1971). 35 Paula Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920’s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977). 36 Blake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst, MA: The University of Massachusetts Press, 2008), 46-47. 37 Robin F. Bachin , Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago 1890-1919 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); Steven Diner, A City and its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). 17

Although Los Angeles in the 1920s and 1930s was not the vastly diverse city it is today, it had a made a start toward its polyracial future. Along with the White majority, substantial Mexican, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino/a, and African American populations called the City of Angels their home. Structural racial discrimination assumed many guises outside school—including discriminatory banking practices, residential housing segregation, and closed workshops and professions—and in schools: intelligence testing, racially-biased academic tracking and vocational guidance counseling, and lack of college counseling. These forms of discrimination, coupled with outright White hostility, greatly narrowed college opportunities for students of color. Examining the histories of

African Americans 38 , Mexicans and Mexican Americans 39 , Asian Americans and Pacific

Islanders, 40 and American Indians 41 is vital, if only to observe the restrictive historical

38 Laurence DeGraaf, “City of Black Angels: The Evolution of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930” Pacific Historical Review 89 , 328-358; Gabrielle Morris, Head of the Class: An Oral History of the African American Achievement in Higher Education and Beyond (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1995); Josh Sides, L.A. City Limits: African American Los Angeles from the Great Depression to the Present (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003); Douglas Flamming, Bound for Freedom: Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005). 39 Gilbert G. Gonzalez, Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation ( Philadelphia: Bilch Institute Press, 1990); Douglas Monroy, Rebirth: Mexican Los Angeles from the Great Migration to the Great Depression (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Martha Menchaca, M. and Richard R. Valencia, “Anglo- Saxon Ideologies in the 1920s-1930s: their Impact on the Segregation of Mexican-American Students in California,” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 21 (1990): 222-249; Victoria María MacDonald and Teresa García, “Historical Perspectives on Latino Access to Higher Education, 1848-1990” in Jeanett Castellanos, Lee Jones, eds., The Majority in the Minority: Expanding the Representation of Latina/o Faculty, Administrators and Students in Higher Education Herndon, Virginia: Stylus Publishers LLC, 2003); Victoria María MacDonald, “Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or ‘Other’?: Deconstructing the Relationship between Historians and Hispanic American Educational History,” History of Education Quarterly 41(3 ), 365-413; Guadalupe San Miguel, Jr., “Status of the Historiography of Chicano Education: a Preliminary Analysis.” History of Education Quarterly 26(4) , 523-536; Christopher J. Tudico, “Before We Were Chicano/as: The Mexican American Experience in California Higher Education, 1848-1945, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010). Unpublished dissertation. 40 Roger Daniels, The Politics of Prejudice: The Anti-Japanese Movement in California and the Struggle for Japanese Exclusion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999); Ronald Takaki, Strangers from a Distant Shore: the History of Asian Americans (Boston: Little, Brown: 1998); Eileen H. Tamura, “Asian- Americans in the History of Education: an Historiographical Essay” History of Education Quarterly 41(1): 58-71; Meyer Weinberg, Asian-American Education: Historical Background and Current Realities (Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers, 1997); Andrew Gyory, Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998. 18 college opportunities for students of these backgrounds. What was past may be prologue to today’s racially stratified Los Angeles colleges and universities.

One of the first to tackle Los Angeles as a historical subject was Carey

McWilliams, a muckraking California journalist, known best in later years as editor of

The Nation from 1951 to 1975. 42 McWilliams attended the Southern Branch for one semester in the mid-1920s but transferred to the University of Southern California because he found the former lacked a full college culture. 43 His book Southern

California: an Island on the Land is still considered one of the key sources on the city’s early history because he addresses the paradox of a place that consciously set itself apart from the rest of the country, almost as an exotic dream, yet remained intensely White and mid-western in its culture. 44 McWilliams criticizes the city to the brink of damning it, but retains an oddly affectionate tone.

McWilliams’ ambivalence has been echoed in many histories and studies of Los

Angeles, from Kevin Starr's generally positive series of volumes on the history of

California to Mike Davis's more critical studies. 45 Urban and cultural geographers have found Los Angeles a rich subject for their studies, finding it both a new and original type of American city—built horizontally as a sprawling flat series of villages not a vertically

41 Irving Hendrick, “Federal Policies Affecting the Education of Indians in California, 1849-1934.” History of Education Quarterly (Summer 1976), 162-183; Nicholas G. Rosenthal, Reimagining Indian Country , Chapel Hill, North Carolina: The University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 42 Carey McWilliams, Southern California: an Island on the Land ( Los Angeles, Gibbs Smith, 1973). 43 Carey McWilliams, “Honorable in All Things: The Memoirs of Carey McWilliams”, interviewed by Joel R. Gardner, Oral History Program, University of California, Berkeley, Tape Number: I, Side Two (July 10, 1978), 27-28. http://www.oac.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft2m3nb08v/ . 44 McWilliams, Southern California: an Island on the Land , 6. 45 Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (New York: Vintage Books, 1992). 19 built city of skyscrapers—and also as a model for newer cities, both in the United States and around the world. 46

Historical Sources

Los Angeles has as rich a past as any city, yet its transient population and shifting demographics have inspired some to label it an ahistorical place, with its people often oblivious to the city’s history. 47 Historians of Los Angeles face unique challenges regarding sources and research. Hollywood has made myths and blurred reality for a century, and only by deconstructing these myths and viewing historical sources critically may a historian gather new insights. Norman Klein, who has studied the ahistorical nature of Los Angeles in his research on architecture and urban development, has described his own writing as the "open-ended diagram of what information cannot be found; the document that was tossed away; the cracks in the sidewalks where the roots of trees, now gone, lifted the street." 48 Southern California’s private colleges have moved locations many times, always in the search of the perfect campus and the best fitting missions, as will be discussed in Chapter 4. This practice has been easy to observe with regard to early UCLA and its institutional wanderlust : its first campus (as the State

Normal School of Los Angeles) now is the site of the Los Angeles Central Public

Library; on its second campus site (on Vermont Avenue) now sits Los Angeles City

College.

46 Reynar Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009); Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005); Robert M. Fogelson, The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850-1930 (Berkeley” University of California Press, 1993); Edward W. Soja, and Allen J. Scott, eds., The City: Los Angeles and Urban Theory at the End of the Twentieth Century , (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997). 47 Norman M. Klein, The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory (New York: Verso Books, 1997). 48 Ibid., 88. 20

Historians' methodological perspectives on the history of education have significantly changed in the past fifty years. One of the most important developments has been the rise in popularity of oral histories, an especially critical development with regard to this work, as oral histories are heavily cited. Where official records and statistics do not provide a satisfactorily full portrait of the past, oral histories may be used to fill in the gaps or even to sketch a new portrait, "preserving feelings and attitudes, shedding light on the emotional atmosphere in which decisions were made or actions taken." 49 Great care, however, must be taken in the use of oral histories as sources. Jacques Barzun’s warning is always pertinent: “the interviewer’s questions no less than the answers he gets can introduce bias, purposely or not; and unlike the published reminiscence, the tape eludes the criticism—indeed the outcry of other witnesses.” 50

The primary research done for this dissertation centers on several collections and groups of literature, most notably oral histories of early UCLA students and professors, part of UCLA’s Oral History Collection in the UCLA Young Research Library’s

Department of Special Collections. Student accounts and remembrances are given special priority. Other institutional histories have employed oral histories held by UCLA’s

University Archives, but have not given them central attention as we do in this study. The oral histories examined for this study are insider accounts, that is, the students were interviewed decades after their college years, and most had gone on to have successful careers, or be active in alumni activities, and most were pleased with their college experiences. There are dangers in giving great weight to accounts of this selective

49 William W. Cutler, "Asking for Answers: Oral History," in Historical Inquiry in Education: A Research Agenda , John H. Best, ed. (Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1983), 94-108, 96. 50 Jacques Barzun, The Modern Researcher , 156. 21 subgroup of UCLA students. If they were leaders in their college days, then they would likely offer happy memories, or be hesitant to criticize Old Alma Mater. 51 Nevertheless, these subjects were interviewed in the 1970s and 1980s, decades after they graduated; by then they had survived the Great Depression, and been "tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace." 52 They answered their interviewers' sharp questions directly and plainly, and were sometimes dissatisfied with the direction their university had taken. For example, John Canaday, who in the 1960s and 1970s served on the University of

California Board of Regents, bitterly compared the student activism of his student days, which centered on rallying votes for bond measures for the new Westwood campus, to the raucous student protests of the 1960s:

I remember later, when I was a Regent, we had a Regents’ Meeting [at UCLA.] I recall there was a student demonstration—they were throwing rocks into windows and everything else—and I recalled to my fellow Regents that it was on this spot where students today are trying to destroy the university that thirty or thirty-five years ago, several thousand UCLA students came out in a demonstration to convince the people of Los Angeles County and the Los Angeles area to put up a million dollars to buy the property that they’re now trying to destroy. 53

Most interviewees mixed their nostalgia with regret at unfilled aspirations and dreams. Tracking this nostalgia and its impact on memories is critical for historians of higher education; after all, colleges are nostalgia factories.

The oral histories of students of color, who just like the informants in the Student

Leaders Collection had sometimes gone on to great success, offer valuable details on racism at UCLA and in California in the period and strategies students of color used to

51 This is especially pertinent concerning earlier interviews from the 1960s and early 1970s, which often were conducted by John Jackson, UCLA ’27, a founder of the UCLA Alumni Association, author (or co- author) of UCLA’s first two institutional histories, and a friend of many interviewees. 52 John F. Kennedy, Presidential Inaugural Address , January 20, 1961. Retrieved online August 22, 2011 from http://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Ready-Reference/JFK-Miscellaneous-Information/Inaugural- Address.aspx . 53 John Canaday, “Alumni officer and university regent : oral history transcript,” Interviewed by John B. Jackson, Dept. of Special Collections, University Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1974, 22. 22 battle against and cope with this racism, whether it be structural or personally directed against them individually. Oral histories of these students also demonstrate powerfully that students at UCLA were not merely White and non-White, but from varied racial backgrounds, and that the experiences of, for example, Japanese American students differed markedly from African American students. Yet they share the common trait of being outsiders to the privileged racial majority, and resisting bigotry and prejudice to persevere to graduation.

Regardless of oral history's limitations, it is a powerful counterbalance to straightforward biography or autobiography in the historiography of higher education.

From 1915 to 1930, five thousand biographies were published in the United States—this wide popular acceptance led to historians' swift acceptance of the form as valuable data.

Biography's popularity has resulted in the domination of histories of higher education— especially accounts of specific institutions—by a few hundred men who had been college or university presidents. 54 Biographies of college and university presidents and other campus leaders, as one historian has stated are "characteristically smug, parochial, and one-sided." 55 While their own writings and other materials about these institutional leaders are considered here, these “great men” biographies do not receive the centrality given to contemporary student accounts.

University administrative files are also major primary sources, especially the

University of California's annual reports to the University's Board of Regents, and the

University Recorder’s annual statistical reports. These reports show the development of

54 Geraldine Clifford in Perspectives on Higher Education: Eight Disciplinary and Comparative Views, Burton Clark, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1987), 58; Beech, "Presidents'-Eye View of History of Higher Education,” History of Education Quarterly 12 (Winter, 1972) 575, 584. 55 Clifford, “Equally in View,” 63. 23 the curricula, enrollment trends, expansion of physical infrastructure, and relative importance of competing missions and agendas. While the University of California is indirectly accountable to the state government and people, it has always been directly accountable to its Board of Regents. 56 Also reviewed were the Special Collections of Dr.

Ralph Bunche’s papers and documents housed at the UCLA Young Research Library’s

Department of Special Collections, along with various speeches, writings, and communications. 57

Several important biographies studied for this paper are those of Edward Dickson, a key University of California Regent—often termed the "godfather of UCLA" 58 for his key role in creating a southern branch of the University of California, Ernest Carroll

Moore, former Superintendent of Los Angeles city schools and the first Director of the

Southern Branch, and University of California Presidents David Barrows and Robert

Gordon Sproul. Various daily newspapers, such as the Los Angeles Times , Los Angeles

Daily News, New York Times , and several versions of the daily UCLA student newspaper

The Daily Bruin also proved useful. Although outdated, Arthur Young's compilation of dissertations relating to American life includes a vast number of historical studies, and is a good starting point for historians of higher education considering research topics. 59

List of Chapters

56 The definitive history of the University of California Board of Regents and its vital importance still waits to be written and would be a welcome addition to the historical literature on the University. 57 Ben Keppel, “Thinking through a Life: Reconsidering the Origins of Ralph J. Bunche” The Journal of Negro Education 73 (2 ), 116-124. Dr. Bunche attended Jefferson High School in Los Angeles, UCLA, and Harvard before enjoying a notable career in the diplomatic service; he eventually served as Undersecretary of the United Nations and won the Nobel Peace Prize. His life story offers a unique perspective on African American history, race relations in Los Angeles, especially with regard to higher education opportunities for black students in the area. 58 Dundjerski, 10. 59 Higher Education in American Life, 1636-1986: a bibliography of dissertations and theses . Arthur P. Young, ed. (New York: Greenwood Press, 1988). 24

This dissertation is divided into three parts:

Part I. Relevant Historical and Educational Context of Los Angeles

Part II. Historical Factors Encouraging Creation of UCLA

Part III. Moving Forward as a New, Growing University

Part I

Part I consists of the Introduction (Chapter One) and Chapters Two, Three, and

Four, and demonstrates the rapid growth of Los Angeles and its surrounding region and reveals the surging demand for college in general, and for a prestigious public university, preferably a University of California campus.

Chapter Two focuses on the history of the city of Los Angeles and its surrounding areas during the years this study covers. This chapter tracks Los Angeles' rapid rise in the early decades of the twentieth century from a small town to California's major metropolis, and the largest city west of the Mississippi. In 1919, a second public university in California—whether a branch of the University of California or a new independent entity—was greatly desired in Southern California. Los Angeles exceeded

San Francisco in population according to the 1920 Census, and by this time there were more freshmen enrolling at Berkeley from Los Angeles than from San Francisco. 60 The delay in the delivery of public higher education to the region can only be explained by the delay in Los Angeles' political power matching its new demographic and economic power: until the 1920s, only one member of the University of California Board of

Regents was from Southern California. 61

60 Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education , 128. 61 Edward A. Dickson, The University of California at Los Angeles: Its Origin and Formative Years (Los Angeles: Anderson, Ritchie & Simon, 1955), 2. 25

Today, the city's wide variety of nationalities, races, religions, and tongues are taken for granted, yet the first half of the twentieth century showed a much different Los

Angeles. The city and its surrounding county and region were comprised primarily of

White emigrants from Iowa, Michigan, Illinois, and other Midwestern states. Federal restrictions on immigration from Asian countries and outright White hostility toward

Mexicans (resulting in a great deportation of Mexican emigrants in the 1930s) restricted the growth of Chinese, Japanese, Mexican, and Central American populations. African

Americans only moved to Los Angeles in large numbers during World War II (1941-45), as many jobs opened in wartime industries on the Pacific Coast, hoping to find new economic opportunities denied to them in the South.62 However, there was already a bustling, active black community in Los Angeles by 1941, which yielded some of

UCLA's most famous students from its early history: Ralph Bunche, diplomat and Nobel

Peace Prize Winner; James LuValle, Olympian and the first African American to work at

Eastman Kodak; baseball legend Jackie Robinson, and Tom Bradley, later Mayor of Los

Angeles. While structural racism certainly limited enrollments of Black students at

UCLA, it is also important to examine paths of Black students who persist and meet with success, both historically and today.63

Chapter Three continues the historical examination of Los Angeles, but is mainly restricted to primary and secondary education, appropriately, as to the contemporary public, and junior college were considered more like upper high schools. In this period, students mainly stayed near home to attend college, therefore histories of higher

62 Isabel Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns : The Epic Story of America’s Great Migration. New York: Random House, 2010. 63 Shaun R. Harper, "In His Name: Rigor and Relevance in Research on African American Males in Education," Journal of African American Males in Education 1 (1) (2010), 1-6. 26 education in these times should give the history of local high schools some attention.

Academic tracking and socio-economic stratification were just beginning to lead to the widespread sorting of students into vocational or college tracks. 64 Different high schools maintained different missions, possibly affecting the college trajectories of their students.

As mentioned in Chapter 8, for example, more students from Los Angeles High School, for example, enrolled at UCLA than graduates of Manual Arts High School. Both were standard comprehensive high schools, but the former had a college preparatory emphasis, which was not common for the time. Also examined in this chapter are race relations and racial segregation, formal and informal, in the Los Angeles public schools of the period, because when students of color were forced by residential segregation or by administrative decisions into vocational tracks, then their opportunities to attend college plummeted.

Chapter Four examines a private sector that thrived during Los Angeles’ growth from village to town to city, even while facing terrible financial pressure. Los Angeles lacked public institutions of higher education (other than the State Normal School) for many years, and private colleges sought to meet the growing demand. Some have survived even to the present day. Others fell into oblivion, crushed by heavy financial burdens. Paradoxically, as will be discussed in Chapter Four through examination of several case examples, the insertion of a massive new public actor (UCLA) into their midst allowed private colleges to relax into more doable missions, helping to ensure their individual survival.

64 Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2005), 14-15. 27

Part II outlines the outside historical forces and cultural influences that helped to drive UCLA’s transition from Normal School to university and then solidified that transition. 65 As will be discussed in Chapter Six, the Normal School’s strong commitment to the war effort during World War I and its struggle to maintain independence against military interference during the war and while battling a terrible flu pandemic shows how the Normal School almost overnight began to be perceived as something much more than a Normal School and more like a full university. World War I fostered anti-ROTC sentiment and helped trigger a strong student protest and anti-war movement in the 1930s. Discussing the 1919 flu pandemic and its effects at colleges across the country offers us a valuable opportunity to ground UCLA’s history in

American higher education during a crucial moment. Further, summer sessions were becoming popular at the exact moment of the Normal School’s transition to university campus, and UCLA’s advocates cleverly used this neutral and successful program to plant the seeds of the new campus in Los Angeles. Finally, no history of Los Angeles during this period would be adequate without showing the burgeoning power of the new film industry. Movie directors pointed their cameras on UCLA’s first small Vermont

Avenue campus, saying “let it be a major university” and it was a major university—or at least a fictional major university—in the perception of filmgoers. Accordingly, Chapter 5 is devoted to the history of summer sessions at UCLA, Chapter 6 covers the flu pandemic and First World War experience at colleges nationally and specifically at the Los Angeles

State Normal School—one year prior to its becoming UCLA, and Chapter 7 analyzes the

65 Keith W. Anderson has recently self-published a valuable book on the history of the Los Angeles State Normal School, arguing that UCLA’s true founding date is when the Normal School was founded. http://ucla1881.com/ . 28 genre of college films during the 1920s and 1930s and whether a California aesthetic or spirit infuses these films, and how UCLA was affected by being a filming site.

Part Three tells the story of UCLA’s early years on its Vermont Avenue and then its new Westwood campus. Chapter 8 focuses on UCLA's swift institutional transformation from a two-year college to the second flagship campus of the University of California. This institutional narrative is the organizing story for most "house histories" of colleges and universities, and it is vital to explain UCLA's rocketing trajectory to full university status: no other state normal schools managed this rapid, one- step transition. Chapter 8 addresses both the external events and trends driving UCLA in its swift growth, and the internal changes on campus, as the curriculum shifted in the

1920s from a normal school’s catalog of courses to a full research university schedule and the faculty transformed at the same time from the State Normal School’s teachers to a professoriate recruited from the entire nation, specialists in a hundred fields and sub- fields. Chapter 8 also contains a discussion of the effects of the Great Depression on

UCLA and its students. During the 1920s, a college education was presumed to bring definite financial rewards and expanded economic opportunities. The 1929 stock market crash and subsequent Great Depression punctured the dreams of Los Angeles college students, introducing grim new economic realities and diminishing their material expectations. American college students, who previously had been apolitical, were often radicalized by the tough new times. Frustrated and angry, they were pulled to the far left and right ends of the political spectrum. The 1930s was the first decade to witness frequent political rallies on UCLA’s campus and occasional accompanying disturbances.

Students who were considered communist sympathizers were expelled from school for

29 their political activities. A theme of "us" (university administrators, campus athletes, and

Greek fraternal organizations) vs. "them" (foreigners and socialist and Communist students) developed, with bullying masquerading as school spirit. Scars from these troubled years would bleed fresh during the 1960s in more campus tumult and violence.

Women students were crucial to early UCLA's growth, and so Chapter 9 is devoted to them. In the 1920s and 1930s women students comprised from one-half to two-thirds of undergraduate students, and half of graduate students. The experiences of

UCLA’s women students in the university's early years are vital in determining whether their college experiences were qualitatively different from their peers at similar coeducational universities.

Across many of these chapters, issues of equity and access to UCLA and, more broadly, race relations on campus are considered. Few students of color attended UCLA during the period of this study. 66 White students did not consider this a crisis; in fact, as

Dean McHenry recalled, “I suppose we thought it was natural. I don’t think I ever gave it much thought…in my time as a student, we had more concern about the poverty line and the people who couldn’t afford to come...we were taking on such large numbers of Okies and Arkies, all of who were terribly poor.” 67 Yet race was considered enough of a problem for UCLA to maintain administrative files on enrollments with regard to race and national origin, and certainly students of color from these times remember racism distinctly. For example, while Japanese Americans were largely ignored by the White

66 Irving G. Hendrick, California Education: A Brief History (San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser Publishing Company, 1980), 65. As recent as 1968, under two percent of the students enrolled at University of California’s campuses were Mexican Americans, only slightly more than two percent were African Americans, and under one percent were American Indians. 67 Dean E. McHenry, “UCLA Student Leaders: Dean E. McHenry,” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1991, 1992 by Dale Trelevan. Collection 300/375, Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 51. 30 majority, this attitude swung to jingoistic fury and race hatred in California following the attack on Pearl Harbor, leading to the federal government’s internments of all Japanese

Americans on the Pacific Coast, including 244 UCLA students. 68

Chapter 10 analyzes UCLA’s move from its first campus on Vermont Avenue to

Westwood, and argues that this is the first partnership, a tacit one, between a private sector land developer (the Janss Investment Company) and public sector (the University of California and several municipalities) for developing simultaneously a university campus, commercial village, and exclusive residential neighborhood, Holmby Hills. As

UCLA did not build dormitories and had few restaurants or other attractions on campus for students, Westwood Village was intended to provide all of these things. Yet covenants barring all but Whites from renting or owning property in Westwood Village led to a socially and residentially segregated zone surrounding the new university. This made commuting to school difficult for students of color and did not offer a warm campus climate for them with respect to extracurricular activities. Accordingly, while being a public university which legally was open to all, UCLA began its history as an exclusive institution, nestled comfortably against pricey neighborhoods like Bel Air and

Holmby Hills and adjacent to Westwood Village, which was open only to those who were welcome there. Pangs from this institutional birth linger on in UCLA’s still troubled racial and ethnic climate.

The dissertation will conclude with a short epilogue tracking UCLA’s path to prestige since its early years and present challenges—many which may be linked to issues inherent in the campus’s founding era, a conclusion, a section of photographs, and a bibliography of works consulted in this study.

68 Lim, 46. 31

Chapter 2: A Brief History of Los Angeles: 1850-1919

Los Angeles is the second largest city in the United States, the economic center of

California, a mass media capital, and a major shipping center. Historically, it has exported the

California Dream, and received immigrants from other states and nations in the millions. 1

Today, nearly four million people live within the city’s limits, and over ten million people live in

Los Angeles County. 2 Los Angeles is the major metropolis in California, a state which if

considered as a separate nation has the world's eighth largest economy. 3 It is a global city, a

leader in manufacturing, entertainment, trade, shipping, aviation, technology, and

telecommunications. 4 Thousands of foreign nationals migrate to Los Angeles each year, whether to seek business opportunities, or to attend one of the area's colleges and universities, or to reunite with family members who have already moved to the area.

With its flat, decentralized sprawling urban topology, Los Angeles has provided an alternative to New York, Chicago, and other vertically built, downtown-centered cities. As

Lawrence Culver explains, unlike Chicago, “Los Angeles did not adopt a City Beautiful plan, nor did it buy undeveloped landscapes for recreational purposes” because there were beaches and

1 Kevin Starr, historian and former California State Librarian, has written an acclaimed series of books on American and the California dream. Starr’s work achieves its greatest focus and intensity regarding the years directly prior to and following Starr’s birth (1940) in San Francisco and childhood, though he has covered California from statehood to the present. Americans and the California Dream, 1850-1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986); Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era (1985); Material Dreams: Southern California through the 1920s (1990); Endangered Dreams: The Great Depression in California (1996); The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (1997); Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 (2002); Coast Of Dreams: California on the Edge, 1990-2002 (2004); Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance , 1950- 1963 (2009). Higher education is a vital part of the California Dream, according to Starr, and it receives close attention in this series, especially in Material Dreams , where the University of Southern California’s history is analyzed. Starr has also written institutional histories of the Claremont Colleges and Loyola Marymount University. 2 As of 2014, an estimated 10,116,705 people live in Los Angeles County, and 3,928,864 in the City of Los Angeles. U.S. Census Bureau, Quick Facts on File , http://quickfacts.census.gov/qfd/states/06/06037.html . 3 State of California Legislative Analyst's Office. "Cal Facts: California's Economy and Budget in Perspective., December 2014,” http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2014/calfacts/calfacts-2014.pdf . The United States (including California), China, Japan, Germany, France, the United Kingdom, and Brazil are ahead of California, which has an estimated Gross Domestic Product of $2.2 trillion. (Texas is the second ranked state with a GDP of $1.5 trillion). 4 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities , Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999; Brookings Institution, “The Ten Traits of Globally Fluent Metro Areas,” http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/Multimedia/Interactives/2013/tentraits/Los_Angeles.pdf .

33 mountains and acres upon acres of scrubby grassland surrounding the small city center in the late

1800s. 5 Instead of a large central city of skyscrapers, Los Angeles became a decentralized patchwork quilt of garden towns, without massive European immigration or heavy industrialization. 6 Angelenos were among the first Americans to embrace the automobile, freeways, and the first to suffer stifling traffic and then later, gridlock. Racial segregation was not mandated by law, but informally enforced through private covenants and prejudice. Property owners resented paying taxes for services provided to distant parts of the city to which they felt no ties of loyalty or affection. Over the decades, the homeless came to huddle under graffiti- sprayed freeway overpasses. Race riots flared up and burnt out. Smog crept in. 7 Despite these negative trends, Los Angeles remains perpetually poised between prosperity and ruin. Its geographic location has been its greatest blessing and—with drought and earthquakes a constant worry—its greatest curse as well. Los Angeles has provided its example to desert cities like Las

Vegas, Phoenix, and Tucson, which also seized water where they could, poured oceans of asphalt, built highways and housing, and planned ambitious futures as desert metropolitan centers. 8

Though Los Angeles was promoted as an "Anglo-American colony on the Pacific Rim," today it is a city of many peoples, languages, and cultures. 9 The city is perched on the Pacific

Rim and is a gateway to Hawaii, Asia, Mexico, and to Central and South America. The United

States of the twenty-first century grows ever more racially and ethnically diverse, and Los

Angeles is leading the way. Yet judging California and Los Angeles’ past through present day

5 Lawrence Culver, “America’s Playground: Recreation and Race,” in A Companion to Los Angeles , eds. William Deverell and Greg Hise (New York: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 422-437, 423. 6 Ibid. 7 Marvin Brienes , " Smog Comes to Los Angeles ," Southern California Quarterly 43 ,4 (Winter 1976 ), 515-533, 515. 8 Joe Day, “Forward,” in Banham, Architecture of Four Ecologies , xvii. 9 Kevin Starr, Material Dreams : Southern California through the 1920s, viii.

34 perspectives would copy the historical hindsight warned of in the introductory chapter. In this dissertation we focus solely on the Los Angeles of the 1920s and 1930s—a city only newly emerged from its small town days, but which was perched at the beginning of explosive future growth. This growth would provide much of the force pushing UCLA from normal school to research university.

Los Angeles was founded in 1781 as a Spanish colonial village and after Mexican independence in 1821 was absorbed into the Mexican state of Alta California, which was then populated mainly by 5,000 to 10,000 American Indians living from Santa Barbara and the

Channel Islands to the west to present day San Bernardino in the east. Alta California was sparsely populated, with Spain and then Mexico unable to encourage heavy emigration to the area. 10 After the United States defeated its southern neighbor in the Mexican-American War of

1846-48, Mexico ceded a third of its entire national territory, including California, to the United

States for $15 million. The transfer of Alta California to the United States was disastrous for the

Indian population, which fell from 300,000 in 1769 to 150,000 in 1848, when the United States took over, and then plummeted to fewer than 30,000 in the 1860s. 11 While the Indian population fell thanks to oppression by American settlers, disease, and starvation, California’s population as a whole exploded at the start of statehood.

“Gold! Gold!” the cry had gone forth in 1848 following the discoveries at Sutter’s Mill near San Francisco, and in 1849, thousands of fortune seekers rushed to California. Prior to the discovery of gold in 1848, most westbound Americans had their sights set on the Oregon territory: only a few hundred moved to California that year. After gold was found, 25,000 people moved to California in 1849, nearly all of them to the gold panning areas in Northern

10 David Wyatt, Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California (Reading, MA: The Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, 1997), 50-51. 11 Stephen Aron, The American West: A Very Short Introduction (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 60-61.

California and to San Francisco. 12 Los Angeles, incorporated as a municipality in 1850, continued along sleepily, mainly untouched by this stampeding horde, retaining a pastoral setting and agricultural economy. Southern California's economy grew, but on a different scale from the frenzy to the north. 13 During the Gold Rush, it seemed, there was more money to be made feeding and equipping miners than from the gold the miners were digging and panning out. Most of the beef, for example, eaten by the gold miners in the northern part of the state came from herds of cattle in the south. 14 And so Southern California remained pastoral for a time, just as it had been during Spain and Mexico’s rule.

A Capital for Southern California

Greater development came during the second half of the nineteenth century, when several wars were quietly waged—not with rifles and artillery but with legislation and financial transactions—to wrest from Southern California everything the area had to offer. Foreign laborers, mainly Chinese, did the backbreaking physical work while much of the financing came from eastern banks and San Francisco railroad companies. Land claim lawsuits between new

American emigrants to California and the formerly Mexican landowners resulted in a huge shift of land ownership from former Mexican citizens to newly arrived Americans. 15 Northern

California financiers speculated wildly in Southern California real estate. With southern

California in the hands of White American land speculators and businessmen, the primary goal of these investors became selecting a southwestern terminus for transcontinental railroads.

12 California in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the Golden State . (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2013), 270-271. 13 The state’s first census, in 1860, found few people in the South—half the population lived in gold mining territory around Sacramento, and a quarter in San Francisco, the largest city, the greatest port. 14 Los Angeles in the 1930s , Federal Writers Project of the Works Progress Administration (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 2011), 40. 15 Starr, California: A History , 104.

In the late nineteenth century, Los Angeles and San Diego both battled to become the main metropolis of southern California, and Los Angeles won out. 16 If only considering geographic advantages, the natural choice was San Diego. With its beautiful deep-water port and close proximity to Mexico, it was a logical place to build trade to Mexico and Latin America.

Los Angeles had its own strengths, however. Chief among these was a phalanx of aggressive civic boosters, spearheaded by several powerful San Francisco bankers and railroad owners. Los

Angeles leaders paid for a port to be dredged in Long Beach, thereby linking railroads to the

Pacific Ocean by way of Los Angeles. Entering the twentieth century, as seen below in Table 2, only San Francisco and Los Angeles ranked as major cities with substantial populations, ranking eleventh and seventeenth in most populous cities in the United States according to the 1910

Census. 17

Table 2: Population of Selected California Cities, 1860-1910

City 1860 1870 1880 1890 1900 1910

San Francisco 56,802 149,473 233,959 298,997 342,782 416,912 Los Angeles 4,385 5,728 11,183 50,395 102,479 319,198 Sacramento 13,785 16,283 21,420 26,386 29,282 44,696 San Diego 731 2,300 2,637 16,159 17,700 39,578 San José n/a 9,089 12,567 18,060 21,500 28,946

The 1880s marked the beginning of Los Angeles' explosive growth transformation from town to city. 18 Los Angeles had only recently become a town of any great size. David Starr

Jordan, later Stanford University’s president, described it in 1879 as “still a mere village—

16 Abu-Lughod, 138. 17 U.S. Census Bureau, Table 14. Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1910 , https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab14.txt . New York (4,766,883) far outpaced its nearest rival, Chicago (2,185,283). Philadelphia was the only other city with a population exceeding one million (1,549,008). 18 McWilliams, Southern California: An Island on the Land , 118-125.

37 mostly Mexican…and the country round was practically a desert of cactus and sagebrush.” 19

However, in 1887, railroad competition dropped fares from Midwestern states to as low as a dollar,20 bringing 200,000 visitors to the area that year, many of whom stayed permanently. The real estate market hit another terrible slump in 1889, but by then 50,000 people had moved to

Los Angeles, and it was an established city. 21 Many newcomers, especially those suffering from tuberculosis, were seeking healthier environs, a warm sun, and a dry climate. Cheap land—or at least the prospect of it—also drew many emigrants to Southern California.

Cities require stronger economic stuff than sunshine, citrus, and civic cheerleading to grow from their townish origins. Above all, Los Angeles needed a purpose for its existence other than to serve as a retirement destination for a few thousand Missourians and Iowans.

Beyond a purpose, Los Angeles needed water to grow its population and to make the desert bloom. These wishes were met with the construction of the Mulholland Aqueduct, bringing water from the San Joaquin Valley to Los Angeles; and with the discovery of “black gold” in

Torrance, Santa Monica Bay, and the Long Beach area. As a historian explained,

It would be difficult to overstate the importance of oil to Los Angeles’ pre-Depression economy…[W]hile Los Angeles did rank ninth among American cities in the value of its industrial output, petroleum refining alone accounted for over one-third of it. Only during the manufacturing boom of World War II would the region have a diversified industrial section of national significance. 22

A new real estate boom began by 1920, with newly arriving White emigrants working the wells and buying property in new subdivisions, carved quickly out of citrus groves and lima bean

19 Earl Pomeroy, Pacific Slope: A History of California, Oregon, Washington, Idaho, Utah, and Nevada (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1965), 141. 20 Abu-Lughod, 138. 21 Adams, Bohemian Los Angeles , 116. 22 Clark Davis, White-Collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000), 25.

38 fields. New twentieth century industries, such as aviation, automobiles, and cinema, also prospered in Los Angeles.

Southern California soon captured the bulk of the film production and distribution market. Cecil DeMille and D.W. Griffith were the two major filmmakers to base their production in Los Angeles (in the Hollywood area specifically), and by 1919, eighty percent of the world's movies were produced in the area.23 Such was Los Angeles's dominance in the field that Hollywood became the descriptive term for the whole film industry, though other filmmaking centers, such as Culver City existed. 24 Indeed, in 1937, Culver City tried unsuccessfully to claim the name “Hollywood” for itself. 25

Los Angeles Takes Its Modern Shape: Demographic Change, Race Relations

In the 1920s, the city of Los Angeles adopted its modern form: a small downtown core with circles of development radiating west to the Pacific coast and north into the San Fernando

Valley. 26 Through the 1930s, Los Angeles sprang forth from its small downtown core, automobiles crisscrossed its network of new roads, the city assumed the West's leadership in banking and finance, and the film industry took hold as the world's leader. The city also greatly expanded its borders through the aggressive annexation of 45 nearby towns and villages, and notably by annexing the San Fernando Valley, “America’s Suburb,” an event considered as historically significant to Los Angeles as the Louisiana Purchase was to the United States. 27

23 Jules Tygiel, "Introduction," in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s , eds. Tom Sitton and Williams Deverell (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2001), 2. 24 Richard Kosarski, An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 (New York: Charles Scribners' Sons, 1990). 25 Stephanie Frank, "Claiming Hollywood Boosters, the Film Industry, and Metropolitan Los Angeles ," Journal of Urban History 38 , 1 (2012): 71-88, 72. 26 Tygiel, 8. 27 Kevin Starr, “Deconstructing California,” Los Angeles Times , May 26, 1996; Kevin Roderick, The San Fernando Valley: America’s Suburb (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Times Press, 2001).

By 1930, Los Angeles was the fifth largest city in the Union with a population of 1.2 million people, the largest city west of the Mississippi River, a major industrial center, and one of a handful of the world's producers of popular culture. 28 Its farmers supplied much of the nation year-round with an exotic and delicious variety of crops. Each year, an expanding network of highways and railroads brought Americans west for economic opportunity and warm weather. In 1932, Los Angeles hosted the Olympic Games, and during this coming out party the world caught a glimpse of this new American metropolis. Today we are reminded of these

Olympics by the name of Olympic Boulevard itself, the Los Angeles Memorial Coliseum, and the tall palm trees lining Crenshaw Boulevard that had been planted for the Games. 29 Cross- country roadways, improving each year across the nation, allowed easterners to make automobile trips to the West Coast, providing further publicity for the region and boosting trade and tourism. 30

Migration of native-born, White Americans fueled Los Angeles’ rapid growth in population in its first fifty years.31 The great majority of these emigrants had arrived from

Midwestern states, taking advantage of cheap tickets on the Santa Fe or Central Railroad from

Chicago, St. Louis, or Kansas City. As previously mentioned, Los Angeles did not experience the great waves of foreign immigration from Eastern and Southern Europe that the great Eastern

28 Population figure derived from U.S. Census Bureau, Table 16. Population of the 100 Largest Urban Places: 1930 , https://www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0027/tab16.txt . 29 Jared Farmer, Trees in Paradise: a California History (New York : W.W. Norton & Company, 2013), 382. As Farmer explains, the City of Los Angeles used unemployment relief bonds for a palm tree planting campaign, and “in just six months, [400 men] spruced up L.A. in time for the Olympic Games of 1932. Priority went to major automobile arteries that would serve as gateways for visitors…” Today, Los Angeles commuters crawling along the Santa Monica Freeway (Interstate Highway 10) at the Crenshaw Boulevard exit pass many palm trees planted for the 1932 Olympic Games, lining the side of the freeway. At dawn’s break, it makes a dramatic frame for the still small Los Angeles city center. 30 California highways had the reputation as being among the best in the nation, as Lt. Col. Dwight D. Eisenhower discovered on his 1919 automobile and truck cross-country convoy, conducted for the Army to ascertain the armed forces’ mobility on the country’s roads. http://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/research/online_documents/1919_convoy.html . 31 Fogelson, 80.

40 and Midwestern industrial cities absorbed in the early twentieth century. Tables 3 and 4 below show that even as Los Angeles's population grew rapidly, the proportion of foreign-born Whites dropped and was less than that of other major American cities. These other major cities experienced a drop in the proportion of their foreign-born residents because of tightening immigration laws of the 1920s, but Los Angeles had consistently been lower in foreign-born residents even prior to restrictions placed on Asian immigration by the 1924 Exclusion Act.

Burgeoning new industries such as petroleum, automotive, aviation, and film enticed Americans from other states to migrate to Los Angeles (just as many Southerners, including many African

Americans in the Great Migration moved to Detroit and other Northern cities for jobs in heavy industry).

Table 3: Population Growth in Selected U.S. Cities, 1890-1930 (in thousands) 32 City 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 New York 2,507 3,437 4,767 5,620 6,930 Chicago 1,100 1,699 2,185 2,702 3,376 Philadelphia 1,047 1,204 1,549 1,824 1,951 Los Angeles 50 102 319 577 1,238 Boston 448 561 671 748 781 Detroit 206 286 466 994 1,569 St. Louis 452 575 687 773 822 San Francisco 299 343 417 507 634 Seattle 43 81 237 315 366 Portland 46 90 207 258 302 Denver 107 134 213 256 288

32 Fogelson, 80, citing U.S. Bureau of the Census, Fifteenth Census of the United States: 1930 . Population. Volume I (Washington, 1931), pp. 18, 19, 131.

Table 4: Percentage of Foreign-Born White Population, Selected Cities: 1890-1930 33 City 1890 1900 1910 1920 1930 New York 39 37 40 35 33 Chicago 41 35 36 30 25 Philadelphia 26 23 25 22 19 Los Angeles 22 18 19 19 15 Detroit 39 34 34 29 26 St. Louis 25 19 18 13 10 San Francisco 34 30 31 28 24 Seattle 31 23 26 23 20 Portland 28 20 21 18 16

From the founding of the town, race relations in Los Angeles were troubled, toxic, even murderous. It was "a town in which a man could buy a drink in a full one hundred and ten out of its approximately two hundred and eighty-five business enterprises…[I]t was a haven for thugs." 34 There was a large Chinese population in Los Angeles in the 1870s; not only railroad workers but also doctors, domestic servants, shopkeepers, and other workers lived in the town.

Many Whites and Mexicans seethed at the perceived successes of the Chinese, and resentment blew up into the 1871 Chinese Massacre, in which a mob—with the local police participating— lynched or shot eighteen Chinese townspeople. 35 The federal government limited Chinese immigration through incremental stages in Exclusion Acts of 1882, 1887, and 1907. The

Chinese population in the United States dwindled. Chinese families were artificially small and

33 Ibid. 34 Paul M. De Falla, "Lantern in the Western Sky: The Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, 1871," in A Southern California Historical Anthology , ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. (Los Angeles: Historical Society of Los Angeles, 1984), 174. 35 Zesch, The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012), 251.

42 few because only Chinese men had been allowed to enter the country to work, and not their wives.

In contrast, Japan’s greater prestige and power, enhanced by its convincing defeat of

Russia in the 1904-05 war, led President Theodore Roosevelt to only partially halt Japanese immigration in the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1907. Per this Agreement, the United States continued to allow conditional Japanese immigration, permitting wives, children, and parents of current resident Americans of Japanese descent to come to the U.S. until 1924, when a final

Exclusion Act closed off immigration from all Asian nations, including Japan.36 From 1903 to

1905, over seven thousand (7,226) Koreans emigrated to the United States, with some staying in

Hawai’i, their original stop, to work on sugar plantations in miserable conditions, and with the rest continuing on to California and other states. Most of these Korean immigrants were men

(6,048 men, 637 women and 541 children), twenty to thirty years old and unmarried, coming from a wide variety of social backgrounds; few spoke English, but their literacy rate in Korean was at least 40 percent. As Korea came under Japanese political domination in the 1900s, and was annexed in 1910, American authorities applied the Gentleman’s Agreement of 1908 with

Japan to Koreans as well. 37 This slowed Korean immigration, allowing only 1,100 “picture brides” to come to the U.S. to be married to Korean men, and Korean immigration was ended by the Exclusion Act of 1924, resuming only during the Korean War (1950-53). 38 Though their diaspora was small, the Korean and Korean American rate of participation in higher education was high: in 1938, 1 out of 30 Koreans in the United States attended college (259 students)

36 David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002), 3. 37 Eui-Young Yu, ed., Koreans in Los Angeles: Prospects and Promises (Los Angeles: Center for Korean American Studies, 1982), 10. Prior to Japan annexing Korea in 1910, 50 Korean university students studying in the United States, including Ahn Chang-ho, Syngman Rhee, and Park Yong-man, were active in the Korean nationalist movement to fight against annexation. Rhee later graduated from Princeton University with a Ph.D., studying under then Professor (and University President) Woodrow Wilson. 38 Won Moo Hurh, The Korean Americans (Westport, CT: The Greenwood Publishing Press, 1998), 33.

43 compared to only 1 out of 100 in the total population.39 The University of Southern California successfully recruited Korean American students because of its geographic proximity to the influential Korean Presbyterian Church located on Jefferson Blvd. adjacent to campus. Korean college graduates struggled to get jobs in the professions for which they were trained, however.

For example, Young Sang Kang (alternatively, Yoong-Soong Kang), a graduate of the

University of Chicago Law School, sold oriental herbal medicines in Los Angeles rather than practicing law. 40

As immigration from China, Japan, and Korea slowed, immigration from the Philippine

Islands quickened as large corporations desperately sought replacement laborers for industry and agriculture. From 1907 to 1926, nearly one hundred thousand Filipinos came to work in Hawaii and the continental states. Over half (52,810) settled in Hawaii and the rest in the states

(45,263), mostly in California. From 1922 to 1929, over five thousand Filipino immigrants, 95 percent of whom were men, entered through the Port of Los Angeles. These immigrants lacked formal education and came from various islands in the Philippines, where forty languages were spoken in 87 dialects. An exception to this were the pensianado students, who were sent by the

Territorial Government of the Philippines, 100 to 200 a year, in the early 1900s to the United

States to attend college under the assumption that they would return home to use their training and education to benefit their homeland. By 1912, 209 Filipino men had college degrees from institutions in the United States, and had returned to the Philippines to work. 41 Following the conclusion of the pensianado program, other Filipino men and women emigrated to the United

States to attend college, supporting themselves by working part and full-time jobs in service

39 Yu, Koreans in Los Angeles, 11. 40 Roberta Chang and Wayne Patterson, The Koreans in Hawai’i: A Pictorial History, 1903-2003 (Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2003), 31; Yu, Koreans in Los Angeles , 17. 41 Lorraine Jacobs Crouchett, Filipinos in California: From the Days of the Galleons to the Present (El Cerrito, California: Downey Place Publishing House, Inc., 1982), 31.

44 industries. 42 From 1910 to 1938, 14,000 Filipino/a college students attended institutions of higher education in the United States, though even after earning their degrees many were not hired in their fields of expertise but were forced to work in agricultural or domestic service jobs. 43

Filipino Americans experienced discrimination similar to that faced by other Asian

Americans, yet one strange new twist was added—Filipinos fell into a legal no-man’s land.

They were neither citizens nor non-citizens, but were “United States nationals,” owing to the

Philippines’ status as a U.S. territory. Therefore Filipinos were not permitted to apply for public service jobs, could not be naturalized as citizens, and could not vote.44 Organized labor—what little existed in Los Angeles at the time—shunned Filipinos as well (as of 1920, no Filipino could claim membership in a Los Angeles labor union chapter). 45 In 1935, in the midst of the

Great Depression, Congress passed and President Franklin Roosevelt signed the Filipino

Repatriation Act, in which the federal government offered to pay the full costs of any Filipino emigrants who wanted to go home to the Philippines, so long as they agreed never to return.

While the federal government had high hopes that as many as 45,000 Filipinos would take them up on this offer, only 2,150 left the United States. 46 The Filipino diaspora had established itself firmly in the United States.

Thousands of African Americans eventually moved to Los Angeles, but not for the most part until the Second World War. Miriam Matthews, the first African American librarian for the

Los Angeles Public Library, moved with her family to Los Angeles in 1907. She recalled her

42 Mae Respicio Koerner, Filipinos in Los Angeles (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2007), 9. 43 Crouchett, Filipinos in California , 31-32. 44 Ibid, 34. Filipino/as could not be naturalized because of the terms of the Congressional Naturalization Act of 1790, which allowed citizenship be possible only for “free white aliens,” following two years of residence in the United States. 45 Carlos Bulosan, America is in the Heart (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1943); Meyer Weinberg, Asian-American Education , 118. 46 Crouchett, Filipinos in California , 40.

45 mother telling her, “when she went downtown when she first arrived, she never saw another black face.” 47 Before 1941, the small African American population had settled around Central

Avenue and built a strong community in neighborhoods that remained racially segregated. Black families moving to Los Angeles were not necessarily improving their chances for justice; after all, the Ku Klux Klan as late as 1940 marched proudly through downtown Los Angeles.

Nevertheless, Los Angeles offered great hope for African-Americans: as W.E.B. Du Bois wrote in 1913, "Los Angeles is wonderful. Nowhere in the United States is the Negro so well and beautifully housed, nor the average efficiency and intelligence in the colored population so high…Out here in this matchless Southern California there would seem to be no limit to your opportunities, your possibilities." 48 Until recently the history of African Americans in Los

Angeles prior to the Second World War had not been explored deeply by historians, but this is changing, although as pointed out by historian Michael Anthony Slaughter, for the most part,

“education is treated as an afterthought.” 49 Black emigrants to Los Angeles were often torn between their great aspirations and high hopes and their fears that the bigotry they had supposedly left back East would follow them to California. 50 Yet still they came, in no small part thanks to the work of African American city boosters, who were no less energetic than their

White counterparts in selling the city's positive points. 51

47 Gabrielle Morris, Head of the Class: An Oral History of African-American Achievement in Higher Education and Beyond (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1995), 44. 48 Soja and Scott, 342. Soja and Scott make clear that Du Bois tempered these glowing words in the same issue of Crisis: “ Los Angeles is not Paradise, much as the sights of its lilies and roses might lead one at first to believe. The color line is there sharply drawn”, 342. 49 Michael Anthony Slaughter, “Lessons on Freedom: Jefferson High School and Black Los Angeles, 1920-1950,” Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 2014, unpublished dissertation, 9. 50 Wilkerson, The Warmth of Other Suns . 51 William Deverell and Douglas Flamming, "Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity: Boosting Los Angeles: 1880- 1930," in Power and Place in the North American West, ed. Richard White and John M. Finley (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 127-128.

The original mexifornios ( Mexican nationals living in California when statehood was achieved in 1850) dwindled in number during the late nineteenth century. Of the 103,393

Mexican-born United States residents counted in the 1900 United States Census, four-fifths lived in southern Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. 52 In California, the 1900 Census found only 8,000

Mexican-born residents, which matched the number counted in the 1850 Census, following the

Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American War. 53

In the early 1900s, Mexican migration to California exploded, and in 1928, Los Angeles overtook San Antonio as having the largest Mexican population of any city in the United States, making Los Angeles the third largest Mexican city in the world. 54 The twin causes of this exodus were economic opportunity in California, and political unrest in Mexico. In 1910, the Mexican

Revolution brought the First Great Migration of Mexicans to California, though even prior to the

Revolution, the Mexican government encouraged U.S. businesses to operate more freely south of the border, leading to greater flow of laborers back and forth. 55 Over two hundred thousand

Mexicans moved to California between 1910 and 1920, and nearly half a million arrived between

1920 and 1930. From 1900 to 1930, Mexico lost ten percent of its total population through migration to el norte .56 Mexico, California, and Los Angeles were dramatically affected by this mass movement of people.

In the early twentieth century, Mexico was an overwhelmingly agricultural country, with a largely illiterate population. Two-thirds of its citizens could not read Spanish, and the Roman

Catholic Church was still largely responsible for providing schooling, which was mainly

52 George J. Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900- 1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 18. 53 Ibid., 19. 54 Gilbert G. Gonzalez, “Racism, education, and the Mexican community in Los Angeles, 1920-1930,” Societas: A Review of Social History 4 (4) (Autumn 1974): 287-302. 55 Gilbert González, Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants , 1880-1930 (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004). 56 Sánchez, Becoming Mexican American, 18.

47 confined to primary grades. However, a new Constitution passed in 1917 declared in Article 3 that “primary education was to be compulsory,” that “education provided by the State would be free,” and that churches were not permitted to educate laborers or farm workers. 57 In 1921, an amendment to the 1917 constitution authorized the federal government to provide universal public education. The quality of public education in Mexico greatly varied, as wealthier northern states such as Sonora and Chihuahua devoted more revenue to building schools and hiring teachers. Mexican immigrants from other regions were even less likely to have received much formal education. Following the end of the Mexican Civil War (1915-1920), Superintendent of

Los Angeles Schools Susan Dorsey observed large numbers of Mexican students enrolling and,

“in nearly every case they are children of well-to-do Mexicans who have sought refuge in the

United States.” 58

Mexicans were discouraged from full participation in Southern California’s White- dominated society. Regardless of their social background, in California it was very difficult for

Mexicans to gain entry into higher education, the entry point to many professional careers or civil service jobs. Beyond the white collar emigrants mentioned above, many Mexican emigrants were farm workers, and they “followed the fruit”; from harvesting cantaloupes in the

Imperial Valley in May, to picking citrus in Orange and Riverside Counties in September, and grape-crushing in the Napa Valley in between, they crisscrossed the state, finding few comforts and a frosty welcome. When crops were out of season, Mexican laborers worked mainly in railroad construction, and the apparel and furniture industries.

57 1917 Constitution of Mexico, Article III, http://www.latinamericanstudies.org/mexico/1917-Constitution.htm , 58 Los Angeles Times , March 17, 1920. Susan Dorsey, LAUSD’s first woman Superintendent, was its last female Superintendent until January 2016 when Michelle King was appointed to the position, http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-new-superintendent-for-lausd-20160111-story.html .

Mexico’s consulate office in Los Angeles provided legal protection and services to

Mexican nationals in California because the state courts offered little help. Mexican families were not welcomed into the vast new suburban bungalow subdivisions, but were forced into enclaves, or colonias , among the "industrial-suburban gird of the 1920s"—in other words, nestled up against smokestacks and oil derricks.59 Another factor undermining Mexicans’ transitions to new lives in California was that among Mexican migrants there was a

"presumption of return,” that they would be able to go home to Mexico when conditions had improved, jobs were available, and peace had returned. 60 Accordingly, among Mexicans living in Los Angeles, Southern California was considered " México de afuera ": loosely translated as

"outer Mexico" or "Mexico away." 61 In the 1920s, Mexican migrants often did not seek United

States citizenship—this betrayed one's Mexican roots and patriotism. Mexican migrants were frozen in legal limbo between national identities, yet placed in constant motion provoked by the need to secure good paying work.

American Indians began to move from reservations to urban areas in the 1920s, and according to a 1928 census concerning land claims, 708 California Indians lived in Los Angeles

County, mostly coming from Southern California reservations: Cahuilla, Pechanga, and Agua

Caliente. 62 The main school for American Indians in the Los Angeles area was the Sherman

Institute in Riverside, a federal boarding school where students were trained to work as laborers and domestic servants; there was little to no college preparatory work done at Sherman. 63 Late in the 1930s and into the 1940s, American Indians were recruited to work at manufacturing jobs, especially in war industries and companies like Douglas Aircraft in Santa Monica, which hired

59 Mike Davis, "Sunshine and the Open Shop,” in Metropolis in the Making , 118. 60 Douglas Monroy, "Making Mexico in Los Angeles," in Metropolis in the Making, 161. 61 Ibid. 62 Rosenthal, 20. 63 Ibid., 27.

Wallace Edwards, who had also trained at Santa Monica Technical School, as the first American

Indian to work there, dimpling and riveting aircraft parts. 64

Though Los Angeles had no explicit public segregation policies with respect to housing, employment, or education, private action by White residents (for example, racially restrictive real estate covenants) resulted in de facto racial segregation. Until the U.S. Supreme Court outlawed racial and religious restrictive housing covenants in 1948, these instruments kept

African Americans, Mexicans, Jews, Italians, Chinese, Japanese, Korean, and Filipinos out of many parts of Los Angeles and nearby cities like Glendale, Beverly Hills, and Inglewood. 65

Filipino immigrants, for example, were forced to settle in an impoverished downtown district between Main and Los Angeles Streets, then known as Little Manila (today known as Little

Tokyo). 66 Historic residential segregation in Los Angeles created lasting effects across the local economy and society, and limited opportunities, educational and economic, for non-White residents. 67

Gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgendered Californians were not publicly acknowledged in this period, and sought to avoid public exposure, for good reason. 68 State laws against

“deviant” sexual behavior and wearing the clothes of a member of the opposite sex were strictly enforced in most parts of California, and in much of Los Angeles. Undercover police officers frequented gay and lesbian establishments, hoping to entrap Los Angeles residents in unlawful acts. While UCLA must have enrolled many gay and lesbian students, the times were not ripe

64 Ibid., 65 Michael E. Engh, "Practically Every Religion Being Represented," in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920's , ed. Tom Sitton and William Deverell (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001), 174. 66 Koerner, Filipinos in Los Angeles , 9. 67 Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley, California: The University of California Press, 1994). 68 Lillian Faderman, Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians (New York: Basic Books, 2006); Daniel Hurewitz, Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2007). While helpful in a broader context on LGBT history, neither book deals much with the history of Los Angeles area colleges and universities or their students, faculty, or staff.

50 for them or other southern Californians to live an “out” lifestyle. This hampers historical scholarship regarding gay UCLA students, faculty, and staff, although the pace of this scholarship grows ever faster, and useful studies multiply. 69

A history of public higher education in Los Angeles must address the history of the city as well, especially, as in this work, when the argument is made that a public university created in

Los Angeles during the explosive 1920s was promised swift growth and prestige. The demographic history of Los Angeles has changed tremendously in the past century, and it is important for today’s reader to understand the different racial makeup the city had in the past in order to best understand the context for UCLA’s largely White student population at the time.

69 Katherine Weiler, “The Case of Martha Deane: Sexuality and Power at Cold War UCLA,” History of Education Quarterly 47 (4) (Fall 2007), 470-496. Weiler’s article concerns a UCLA professor, Martha Deane, who had taught at UCLA beginning in the 1920’s while it was still the Southern Branch, long before the Cold War. Deane’s professional demise occurred at UCLA in the 1950s, outside the period of this study. Weiler makes a strong argument that Deane was forced into early retirement because she was outed as a lesbian, and her sexuality was tied to the Red Scare politics pervading many universities at the time.

Chapter 3: The Public Higher Educational Environment in Southern California, 1880-1919

This chapter examines the development of public higher education in California prior to

UCLA’s opening in 1919, and the special relationships between UCLA and its feeder high schools in Los Angeles and the effects these had on students’ college choices. Public high schools, which were themselves still evolving as institutions, served as vital feeders to the

University of California. No mass movement toward college attendance would have been possible in Los Angeles without the successes and great popularity of the local public high schools.

It is easy to forget today, in an era of near universal higher education, that relatively few

Americans attended college until 1920, as shown in Table 5 below.

Table 5: Enrollment in Institutions of Higher Education in United States, 1870-1920

Year Enrollment as Total Enrollment Male Female Percent of 18-24 (in thousands) Year-old Population

1870 1.3 63 50 13 1880 1.6 116 78 38 1890 1.8 157 100 56 1900 2.3 238 152 85 1920 4.7 598 315 283

However, in California the demand for higher education was growing rapidly by the end of the First World War, and (with the exception of USC) Los Angeles's private colleges had neither the “need nor the desire to expand access or to meet regional needs.” 1 Private colleges were not surpassed in enrollments by the University of California’s campuses for years following

UCLA’s opening. In the 1934-35 academic year, for example, private colleges enrolled 25,856

1 William Warren Ferrier, Ninety Years of Education in California: 1846-1936 (Oakland: West Coast Printing Co., 1937), 366-367.

52 students; the University of California enrolled 20,391 (not including summer extension students).

It fell to the public sector, therefore, to fulfill what John Aubrey Douglass has defined as a

“California Idea” of public higher education: a low-tuition, high quality product provided by institutions with differentiated missions. 2 In 1919, these institutions were the University of

California and its agricultural and research stations at Riverside, Davis, and La Jolla; the state normal schools (which, as shown in Table 6 below, with the exception of Santa Barbara would become California State Colleges and then Universities), and various new junior colleges. 3

2 John Aubrey Douglass, The California Idea and American Higher Education ; John Aubrey Douglass ; The Conditions for Admission: Access, Equity and the Social Contract of Public Universities (Stanford University Press 2007). 3 Ibid.

Table 6: California State Normal Schools, Historical Development 1862-Present 4

Year Location of Description of Institutional Development/Evolution Founded Campus

1914 Arcata Humboldt State Normal School; Humboldt State Teachers College (1921); Humboldt State College (1935); Humboldt State University (1972) 1889 Chico State Normal School; State Teachers College (1921); State College (1935); California State University at Chico (1972) 1911 Fresno State Normal School; State Teachers College (1921); State College (1935); California State University at Fresno (1972) 1882 Los Angeles State Normal School (Closed in 1919. Teachers College became part of Southern Branch of University of California ( UCLA ).) 1898 San Diego State Normal School; State Teachers College (1921); State College (1935); California State University at San Diego (1972) 1899 San State Normal School; State Teachers College (1921); State College (1935); Francisco California State University at San Francisco (1972) 1862 San José State Normal School (located in San Francisco, 1862-1871); State Teachers College (1921); State College (1935); San José State University (1972) 1910 Santa State Normal School of Manual Arts and Home Economics; State Normal School Barbara 5 (1919); State Teachers College (1921); State College (1935); College of the University of California (1944); University of California at Santa Barbara (1958)

The missions of these colleges and universities were not yet clearly defined, and overlapped with each other. In the case of normal schools and junior colleges, missions overlapped with the local high schools. On the athletic fields and courts, normal schools and junior colleges played high schools to fill out their schedules and California’s first junior colleges shared space with high schools and normal schools. 6

Public Higher Education During California's Early Statehood

4 Ogren, The American State Normal School, 214-215. 5 Only UCLA and the University of California, Santa Barbara became research universities within the University of California system. UC Santa Barbara's development is outside the scope of this study because it did not attain university status until 1946. Santa Barbara's special status as both an economic hinterland of Los Angeles and at the same time a cultural rival (and near equal) is a subject discussed in Kevin Starr, Material Dreams: Southern California Through the 1920s (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990). The great wealth and cultural sway held by this relatively small city may have had much to do with its becoming a University of California and not a California State College (later University) campus. 6 Anderson’s monograph on the Los Angeles State Normal School devotes Chapter 4 to the school’s athletics and covers this closely.

By 1920, California was the eleventh largest state in the Union in total population, yet boasted the largest public school enrollments. Californians’ support for public education at the elementary and secondary school levels created a natural large new pool of college applicants, even in an era where college going was not a popular practice. This commitment to public education is more easily understood when considering California under prior Spanish and

Mexican control. Spain did not colonize California aggressively until after 1769. 7 By the time

Mexico's War for Independence (1810-1821) brought the territory under Mexican authority, there were only a handful of private and parochial schools and a series of Catholic missions in

Alta California, which was first a territory, and later a department in Mexico's new republic. 8

Linked by el camino real, which ran from Sonoma in the north to San Diego in the south, twenty-one missions provided rudimentary education for American Indians—domestic skills for the girls, vocational and agricultural skills for the boys. 9 Upon taking authority, the Mexican republican government ended the educational efforts of the Catholic missions. However, few public schools were established in Alta California to take their place. Alta California was sparsely populated—by the beginning of the Mexican American War in 1846, no more than ten thousand Mexican citizens inhabited the territory—and therefore there were few children, fewer schoolteachers, and insufficient tax revenues to justify a new system of public schools.

Moreover, Mexico only had twenty-five years to develop public education in Alta California before ceding it to the United States in 1848 in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican American War.

7 Starr, California: A History , 35-42. 8 Jim B. Pearson and Edgar Fuller, eds., Education in the States: Historical Development and Outlook (Washington, D.C.: National Education Association, 1968), 119. 9 Hendrick, California Education, 3.

American settlers brought ambitious educational plans and ideals, but also did not make much educational progress in the early years of Californian statehood. Even as prospectors flooded San Francisco in search of gold, the newcomers sought to replicate institutions from their home states. The first state constitution, passed in 1849, contemplated a state-supported public educational system that was a “complete and coherent system of education,” a system that

“held equally in view the school and the University.” 10 These were ambitious ideals; however, the University of California would not be founded for another twenty years.

Public higher education in California awaited significant federal aid, which was finally delivered through the First Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862. 11 Congress had given California

46,080 acres of federal land in 1853 under the provisions of the 1787 Northwest Ordinance; however, its helpful effects were limited—the lands sold for only $1.25 per acre, leaving

California with only $57,000 in federal higher education financing prior to the Morrill Act.

Funding derived from the sale of federal land under the Morrill Act allowed California's legislature to combine the private College of California (founded in 1855) and the Agriculture,

Mining and Mechanical Arts College (founded in 1866) into the University of California in

1869. 12 Also under the Morrill Act, Congress granted California lands (totaling 142,000 acres) in Monterey, Mendocino, San Mateo, San Benito, Fresno, Yuba, Kern, El Dorado, Tulare,

Lassen, San Luis Obispo, Nevada, and Inyo Counties, the sales of which had by 1897 yielded for the state treasury over seven hundred thousand dollars ($728,353.53). In 1887, Congress provided further aid under the Hatch Act for scientific and agricultural research, which was put to use in California at newly built agricultural stations at Davis (1905) and Riverside (1907), and

10 Clifford, Equally in View, 1. 11 Ferrier, Ninety Years, 100. 12 The Centennial Record of the University of California , Verne A. Stadtman, ed. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967), 375.

56 the Scripps Institute for Biological Research in La Jolla (1912). Each of these stations eventually became branch campuses of the University of California.

During its first fifty years of statehood, California’s economy was primarily based on agriculture; therefore, farmers provided the votes and state and local revenues for government programs, including public education. Nationally, the farm vote had certainly been taken into account during the passage of the first Morrill Act in 1862. 13 In 1860 the farmers had no organized agrarian program such as emerged later in the Populist movement. Nevertheless, farmers could not be ignored politically, and in the still rurally-dominated United States of the

1850s and 1860s, appeals to farmers garnered many votes.14 California's farmers benefitted from

Morrill's legislation, but not immediately and never to their full satisfaction.

Problems at the University of California regarding agriculture education came to a head with the publication of the “Memorials of the California State Grange and Mechanics’

Deliberative Assembly,” in 1874. The memorial accused the University of not vigorously pursuing the Morrill Land Grant Act’s “leading object,” that is, the teaching of agriculture and mechanic arts. Citing the evidence that five percent of the University’s expenses went to the

College of Agriculture and Mines and that only one faculty member taught all agriculture classes, the State Grange and Mechanics’ Assembly requested funding be provided for an augmented agricultural course of study and physical plant, including “a plain, convenient, and commodious frame house, with suitable outhouses, to be occupied by the Professor of

Agriculture or some practical farmer to act under his direction.” 15 Also, it was urged that the

13 Eldon L. Johnson, "Misconceptions About the Early Land-Grant Colleges" Journal of Higher Education 52 , (4), 333-351, 247. 14 Rudolph, 250, citing Eddy, Colleges for our Land and Time , 27-30. 15 Verne A. Stadtman, The University of California, 1868-1968 , 72.

57 legislature investigate the University of California’s use of Land-Grant Act funds. 16 A joint committee of both houses of the California legislature made its determination. 17 The Committee, in the words of University of California President Gilman, “refrained from all adverse legislation…[But] the peril to the university has been great. The Grangers were determined to capture the concern, -- up to the last moments were endeavoring to abolish the Board of Regents, and substitute a board chosen by popular election…”18 The “peril” referred to by President

Gilman had been to the University’s status as a research university (granted, a young and struggling one) with diverse and ambitious missions. Avoiding the “adverse legislation” allowed the University to proceed on this research road, and not be diverted onto a more agricultural and mechanic track. This tension relating to agricultural education lasted deep in the twentieth century, as farmers' advocates argued for a larger campus site than the one proposed in present day Westwood, which was considered too small for serious farming research.

The California State Normal Schools

Normal schools, based on the French ecoles normales of the early nineteenth century, were innovative institutions designed to further efforts toward mass basic education, raise literacy rates and promote a well-educated labor force. First implemented in Massachusetts in the 1830s, normal schools were eventually chartered in every state, training thousands of schoolteachers, mainly women. By 1900, the normal schools “did not offer bachelor’s degrees and their official purpose was to prepare students of a low-status profession, which colleges and universities had little interest in doing.” 19 The Carnegie Foundation published a review of

Missouri’s normal schools in 1920, finding that they were “nonselective in admissions, granted

16 Ibid., 72-74. 17 Ibid., 75. 18 Ibid. 19 Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School , 2.

58 college credits for ‘very elementary work’, and had ridiculously low failure rates—about 1 percent in education courses.” 20 Even if this Missouri report did not precisely match conditions in California, the public reputation of normal schools was the same in both states. In the early twentieth century, normal schools were mainly converted to teachers’ colleges, abolishing all secondary school-level work, with a president rather than a principal in charge, and requiring applicants to have earned a high school diploma. 21 However, these teachers’ colleges still only offered only degrees in education, and usually not bachelor’s degrees, leaving them still second- class institutions in the public view. 22 UCLA vaulted into state, national, and then international prominence by skipping the intermediate step of becoming a teaching college before becoming a full-fledged University of California campus.

Only eight out of thirty-four states operated normal schools when in 1862, California opened the nation’s fifteenth state normal school in San Francisco with the sole purpose of providing a short vocational course for training elementary school teachers. 23 Prospective schoolteachers from Southern California found travel to San Francisco (and later to San José) difficult, whether by rail or by sea, and calls arose for the establishment of a new normal school for the southern counties. Southern California legislator Reginaldo Del Valle made a successful case for his region similar to the argument made forty years later in favor of southern expansion of the University of California, and Los Angeles was granted a state normal school, which opened in 1882. 24

20 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education , 436. 21 Robert V. Brown, The Rise and Fall of the People’s Colleges: The Westfield Normal School, 1839-1914, (Westfield State College: Westfield, Massachusetts, 1988); Roger Geiger, The History of American Higher Education, 435. 22 Christine Ogren, The American State Normal School , 2. 23 State of California, Report of the Special Legislative Committee on Education (Sacramento: State Printing Office, 1920), 58. 24 David Hayes-Bautista, Marco A. Firebaugh, Cynthia Chamberlain, and Cristine Gamboa, “Reginaldo Francisco del Valle: UCLA's Forgotten Forefather,” Southern California Quarterly , Vol. 88 (1), 2006, 1-35, 1.

The State Normal School of Los Angeles, 1882-1919

In 1881, the State Normal School in San José burned to the ground, leaving the California

Legislature with a decision to make: either to replace the building in San José, move the school to another town, or rebuild the San José school and add a regional branch campus as well. In the

1880-81 legislative session, only four members of the State Assembly were from southern

California counties, but Assemblyman del Valle, the only lawmaker of Mexican origin from southern California, was determined to win for Los Angeles a Normal School campus. 25 Born in

Los Angeles in 1854, del Valle attended St. Vincent’s Academy in Los Angeles from 1867 to

1871, graduated from Santa Clara University in 1873, and then moved to San Francisco to practice law for a few years before returning home to Los Angeles to practice there. He committed himself to growing his home town and wresting state benefits and institutions for it.

Southern California was not nearly as populous as the north, and so nearly all of the major state institutions were located in the north: the University of California in Berkeley, the hospital for the insane in Napa, the capital and state courts in Sacramento, two prisons in San Quentin and

Folsom, and the normal school in San José. 26 After winning election to the State Assembly, del

Valle worked hard to obtain a normal school for Southern California. Del Valle argued that one- third of schoolteachers in Santa Clara and Alameda counties were graduates of the San José

Normal School, but only 2 percent of teachers in Yuba County in the far north of the state and only 3 percent of Los Angeles County had graduated from San José. This was not equitable to the people living in the extreme north or south of the state, pointed out del Valle. In the 1881-82 session, by promising lawmakers from the far northern counties support for their presumed

25 Ibid, 3. 26 Ibid. In 1880, over 90 percent of Californians lived in northern counties, while the combined population of the southern counties (Los Angeles, San Bernardino, San Diego, San Luis Obispo and Ventura) had only risen from 6.3 percent to 8.5 percent of the state total by 1880.

60 future bid for a normal school branch campus, del Valle secured the necessary votes for a branch campus in Los Angeles. 27 He was terribly proud that the first state institution in Los Angeles was not a prison, but rather a school training the teachers of the city’s most precious resource, its children. 28

In a battle foreshadowing the fight for a southern branch campus of the University of

California, in 1887, supporters of the State Normal School in Los Angeles strove to secure full independence from San José. Angelenos took great pride in their school: citizens had bought the six-acre site in 1882 and donated it to the state, and the land’s value had grown to five times its original purchasing price. 29 A half century before smog enshrouded the city, anxiety arose regarding the environmental advantages of all property locations, especially for schools; the Los

Angeles Times reported “the commanding situation [of the Normal campus] gives the normal students the freshest of ocean breezes, untainted by escaping sewer gas or city smoke.” 30

Enrollments grew modestly but steadily at the Los Angeles State Normal School, as seen in the table below, and of the Normal School’s 120 graduates up to 1887, almost all went on to teach in

Southern California schools.

Yet for all of its accomplishments, the Los Angeles Normal School’s supporters craved independence, just as their descendants at the Southern Branch of the University of California would in the 1920s:

The friends of the State Normal School in [Los Angeles], and particularly the earnest workers who have made its name a wide synonym for faithful and thorough training, have been long and inexpressibly annoyed by the dependent position in which the school

27 Ibid., 16. Four years later, del Valle’s support helped win the Northern California counties their own branch campus of the State Normal School in Shasta City. 28 Ibid. 29 “An Institution in which Los Angeles takes just pride,” Los Angeles Times , January 2, 1887. 30 Ibid.

has been kept. It has been tied down with red tape and tagged with the belittling title Branch (italics in article) State Normal School. 31

The Normal School’s history parallels UCLA in another important way, as city leaders, civic boosters, and real estate developers took note of the Normal School’s early growth and competed with each other to lure the campus to a new, bigger location. In 1907, the Normal School contemplated relocation offers from Pasadena, Hollywood, Covina, Santa Monica, Venice, and from the Boyle Heights neighborhood in Los Angeles. Covina offered the most generous gift:

30-40 acres of prime real estate directly on the Pacific Electric streetcar line, with the hope that it might be possible “to obtain for the [commuting] students a 5 to 7 cent fare from Los Angeles [to the new campus.]” 32 In 1911, the school’s relocation seemed even more likely. Henry Busse, a prestigious local architect, proposed that the new campus be located in Echo Park, two and a half miles directly north of the school’s downtown site, saying “when the State of California is divided, as it probably will be at no very distant day, we will find the State Capitol located on one of these magnificent hills.” 33 In the end, the Normal School was relocated to a site on

Vermont Avenue between Melrose Avenue to the south and Santa Monica Boulevard to the north, 4.3 miles northwest of the downtown campus. The Vermont site beat out 28 other possible sites with the main competitor being Busse’s Echo Park location.34 The reasons given for the

Vermont site’s selection are interesting when compared to the reasons given for UCLA being moved to Westwood a decade later:

1. Title transfer to the State of California would be easy; 2. Site had the most acreage of the bidders;

31 “No More Branch: Our Normal School Stands Proudly Independent,” Los Angeles Times , March 14, 1887. 32 “Many Offers for Normal,” Los Angeles Times, March 22, 1907, II3 33 “As a Crown for Rolling Hills: Architects Favor Echo Park for Normal School,” Los Angeles Times , August 5, 1911. There have been various attempts since California achieved statehood to divide the state. The most recent, a proposal by Tim Draper, a wealthy Silicon Valley businessman, failed to qualify for the 2016 ballot in September 2014, http://www.latimes.com/local/political/la-me-pc-six-californias-initiative-20140912-story.html . 34 “State Normal School on Vermont Avenue,” Los Angeles Times , January 26, 1912.

3. Site is level—key for landscape gardening (and the campus would win national landscape awards for this); 4. Good, rich soil for growing plants, trees; 5. Many large shade trees already on site; 6. In area of rapidly growing population, offering a strong attendance base for the Normal School’s training elementary school and offering lots of residences for students; 7. “Reasonable restrictions” on properties in area allow for a wide variety of residences, but do not preclude building new houses “within the reach of the moderately well-to-do”; 8. Good views of mountains; 9. Site fronts on the “longest street in Los Angeles, a beautiful boulevard extending from the mountains to the sea”; 10. Hookups and lines established already for sewer, gas, electric, and a well is on site for water use; 11. A nice house for the school’s janitor was ready for immediate use; 12. Site is within “reasonable distance from the city center”; 13. Street car lines run near to the campus; 14. Railroad crossings do not run across campus, making it a safer campus. 3536

Two main priorities emerge from this list of reasons: first, the campus must be placed in a spot convenient for students—allowing them to live near school if possible and making it easy for them to commute to campus; second, the campus ought to be a beautiful place, or at least it should be able to be made to be beautiful. Without any mention of students, this might be a good plan for where to place a new botanical garden. These priorities reflect city dwellers’ anxieties that a growing metropolis offer a lush, verdant, serene college campus, that even though an institution is set in an urban context, that its environment must match the villages and towns where so many other state universities and private colleges were located.

Nevertheless, no matter how beautiful the new campus was, the Normal School still was not considered a college by the locals, but rather was lumped in with the area high schools.

Directly prior to becoming a branch of the University of California, the University’s President

Benjamin Ide Wheeler spoke at the June 1918 commencement exercises of both Hollywood

35 Ibid. 36 Railroad safety is not a problem confined to the distant past. A fatal train accident occurred next to USC’s campus in March 2015, http://www.latimes.com/local/la-me-0329-metro-expo-line-crash-20150330-story.html .

High School and the Normal School, and the Normal School’s graduating class of 500 was trumpeted as the largest in the city—when compared with the area high schools. 37

The career of Ernest Carroll Moore, who led the Normal School’s transformation to become the southern branch campus of the University of California, shows the permeable boundaries between secondary and higher education in the early twentieth century. Born in 1871,

Moore graduated from a normal school himself, receiving a B.A. from Ohio Normal University before eventually earning a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago in 1898. 38 For eight years, Moore taught philosophy and education at the University of California, which only had its Berkeley location at the time. 39 Then in 1906 he left Berkeley to serve as Superintendent of Schools in Los

Angeles, which today would be a rare professional move to make for a professor. 40 In 1910, he moved back east to teach at Yale and Harvard as a lecturer, before being invited back to head the

Los Angeles State Normal School in 1917. 41 Normal schools, universities, and K-12 schools shared enough common ground in this period so that a man like Moore could move easily between them in teaching and leadership capacities. This would no longer be the case as UCLA grew and the lines between secondary and higher education sharpened: neither normal schools nor Moore’s career would survive the change.

During their first fifty years, the California normal schools tightened their admissions requirements and smoothed their transfer paths to the University of California and Stanford

University. Prior to 1904, any student who had completed the ninth grade could be admitted to the Normal School’s four-year course, which included two years of preparatory work equivalent

37 Los Angeles Times , June 12, 1918. 38 Stadtman, Centennial Record, 332. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid.

64 to two years of high school. After 1904, only high school graduates were admitted and the preparatory grades were abolished, and in 1907, curriculum changes allowed Normal School students to transfer after three years to either Berkeley or Stanford with full standing as juniors.

California’s normal schools expanded their institutional missions during their few decades of operation, anticipating their transformation into campuses of either the University of

California or California State University. Several normal schools offered manual arts programs, attracting mostly male students, who were prized by administrators (who were mostly men themselves) and always considered to be in short supply. 42 By 1923, all the California State

Colleges (former Normal Schools) were authorized to offer baccalaureate degrees in education and home economics. However, the First World War provoked an existential crisis for

California normal schools, with the few male students joining the armed services, and women students working or volunteering in war industries. At the State Normal School in Santa

Barbara, California, women students learning automotive repair were described as follows:

Clad in overalls such as all garage workers wear, these girls attending Normal, who hail from all over the state, have taken to the work just as naturally as if blue jeans and greasy machinery were as familiar to them as the pretty frocks which delighted the summer girl of other days…”I always believed the old saying that all one needs to fix up a flivver is a hairpin,” said Dorothy Showkin of San Gabriel, “but after fussing with this old engine I am positive there are hundreds and hundreds of extra pieces to an automobile engine.” 43

The new and expanded roles normal schools assumed in response to the changes of the war and the influenza pandemic, coupled with the transformation of the Los Angeles State

Normal School to a branch campus of the University of California, led the California legislature

42 Gerth and Grenier, 10. The manual arts programs included training in skills such as woodwork, mechanical drawing, printing, and architectural drafting. 43 “Santa Barbara Normal Course in Auto Mechanics: 22 out of 25 Students are Women,” Los Angeles Times , October 27, 1918., II8.

65 to reorganize the eight remaining normal schools as teachers colleges and place them under the supervision of the State Department of Education. 44

Junior Colleges

Another innovative new institution, the junior college, grew quickly in the first half of the new century in the United States, and particularly enjoyed quick popularity among Californians.

Many of the new junior colleges were established as postsecondary programs in public high schools, such Los Angeles High School (established in 1912) and Hollywood High School

(established in 1911). 45 Private (also known as "independent") junior colleges often grew from the remains of defunct denominational colleges. By 1943, as can be seen in Table 7 below,

California enrolled over one-third of the nation’s junior college students. 46

Table 7: Number of Junior Colleges in U.S., Public and Private Control, 1900-1940 47

Year Public Private (Independent) TOTAL 1900 0 8 8 1915 19 55 74 1920 70 137 207 1925 136 189 325 1930 178 258 436 1935 223 309 532 1940 258 317 575

Community colleges historically have been very popular among students in the Western

United States, and in Arizona Washington, Wyoming, and California, for example, over half the

44 Douglass, The California Idea of Higher Education , 139. The exception was the State Normal School in Santa Barbara, which became first a state college and then a campus in the University of California system in 1946. Its peculiar institutional past is outlined in John A. Douglass, "On Becoming an Old Blue: Santa Barbara's Controversial Transition from a State College to a Campus of the University of California,” Coastlines , pp. 6-11. (Spring 1994). 45 Cox, James N. "The Urban Community College: A Case Study of Los Angeles City College from 1929 to 1970." Unpublished doctoral dissertation, University of California, Los Angeles, 1971. 46 Cohen, Higher Education in the American West , 52. 47 American Association of Community Colleges. National Profile of Community Colleges: Trends & Statistics, 3 rd Edition . Kent Phillipe, Ed. Washington D.C. : American Association of Community Colleges, 2000.

66 student population attends a community college. 48 The large role these two-year colleges play in the western states represents a defining characteristic of the region’s higher education system. 49

The first is the argument that junior and community colleges are western in origin, supported by

William Rainey Harper of the University of Chicago’s original sponsorship of the junior college, or two-year college, and efforts to implement the form by leaders of the University of California and Stanford University.

William Rainey Harper, president of the University of Chicago (1891-1906) suggested that colleges struggling to survive could convert to a junior college format, offering grades thirteen and fourteen in general and vocational education. 50 Schools such as the University of

Chicago could then follow a German model and concentrate on research and graduate scholarship. 51 By 1880, Chicago had assumed the title of the country’s “second city” and was, as historian William Cronon argues, “the headquarters for the late nineteenth-century colonization of the trans-Mississippi West,” with great powers to influence the West in areas such as education. 52 That said, Robert Pedersen downplays the view of William Rainey Harper as a

Promethean figure gracing the creation of junior colleges. 53 Pedersen notes the great success of junior colleges in “small and medium-sized cities of the middle and far West.” 54 These towns and cities – examples cited are Iola, Kansas and Pipestone, Minnesota – that swam outside the

48 Arthur Cohen and Florence Brawer. The American Community College . San Francisco: Josey Bass Publishers, 2008, 61. 49 Longanecker, Higher Education in the American West, 264. 50 Cohen and Brawer, 7. Cohen reports “by 1940, of 203 colleges with enrollments in 1900 of 150 or fewer students, 40 percent had persisted, but 15 percent had become junior colleges.” 51 Ibid. 52 Hine and Faragher, 408. 53 Pedersen, Robert T. “Value Conflict on the Community College Campus: An Examination of its Historical Origins,” 499-509. In The History of Higher Education, ASHE Reader Series, eds. Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Vechsler (Needham Heights, MA: Simon and Schuster Custom Publishing, 1997). 54 Ibid., 502.

67 ken of large universities established junior colleges for their own specific local needs. 55 In many instances, in the communities “a junior college was often their last choice, either following in the wake of failed efforts to secure more traditional forms of higher education or as an ad hoc solution to the threat to community status posed by the unexpected closure of a private college.” 56

Hugh Ross argues that Professor Alexis Lange of the University of California, Berkeley and President David Starr Jordan of Stanford University provided the institutional foundations into which two-year curricular cement could be poured. 57 Ross believes Lange and Jordan’s efforts “came from a desire to eliminate the first two years of undergraduate instruction at the university and transfer them to the high school.” 58 Lange and Jordan’s ideas were translated into pre-college curricular offerings transferable to the University of California, and in 1907, the

University of California began offering a junior certificate that mirrored today’s Associate of

Arts degree, which recognizes the student’s successful completion of the first two years of college course work. 59

Such programs reflected the historical development of higher education in the United

States, which began with colleges and elementary schools and spread inward toward the grades in between, as “colleges organized their own preparatory schools and as public secondary schools were built.” 60 Lange later praised the University of California’s Junior Certificate

Program, declaring, “what was to be known as the Junior College idea had been essentially put

55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ross, Hugh. “University Influence in the Genesis and Growth of Junior Colleges in California.” History of Education Quarterly 3 (1963), 143-152, 144. 58 Ibid., 145. 59 Ibid. 60 Cohen and Brawer, 7. This development along an educational “continuum” occurred from colonial times to the dawn of the twentieth century, when “the gap had been filled.”

68 into practice at Berkeley.” 61 Students at the University of California seeking the Junior

Certificate were required to earn 109 college units, but could earn forty-five credits at their high schools. 62 The California legislature blessed such programs by passing the Laminetti Act in

1907, allowing high schools to offer college courses. 63

Considering William Rainey Harper’s advocacy and the efforts of the University of

California and Stanford University, Western states can claim historical leadership in the development of junior colleges. Of the 85 junior colleges existing in 1918, none may be found

“east of Michigan or north of Kentucky and North Carolina. 64 Community colleges are necessarily a “twentieth century phenomenon” because “[U]ntil the 1900s, two essential components were not yet in place: sizable numbers of students graduating from high school and public school districts managing secondary schools to which they could readily append two or more years of curriculum, with or without special legal sanction.” 65 Yet by 1900, public secondary and elementary school enrollments in the western United States had skyrocketed. 66

Enrollments in institutions of higher education followed accordingly: as seen in Table 8 below, in California they grew five-fold from 1870 to 1910, in Oregon, Nebraska, Missouri, and the other western states greater increases are reported. 67

61 Ross, 145. 62 Ibid. By 1916, about fifty students had transferred from pre-college programs at Fresno, Santa Barbara, Hollywood, and Los Angeles high schools. 63 Harold A. Coller “A Brief History of Community Colleges and a Personal View of Some Issues.” Fairfax, Virginia: George Mason University Press, 2001, 4. 64 Lucas, 221. 65 Cohen and Brawer, 12. 66 See statistics provided in Chapter 4 on rise of public school enrollments by state, 1870 to 1900. 67 American Education 1870-1991: A Statistical Handbook , 78.

Table 8: Enrollment in Institutions of Higher Education By State: 1870 – 1910

1870 1910 Alaska 0 0 Arizona 0 407 California 1,790 11,394 Colorado 0 4,601 Hawaii 0 0 Idaho 0 724 Iowa 1,644 11,146 Kansas 466 9,409 Minnesota 675 9,724 Missouri 2,668 14,844 Montana 0 612 Nebraska 102 7,630 Nevada 0 235 New Mexico 0 342 North Dakota 0 1,382 Oregon 368 2,920 South Dakota 0 1,763 Utah 296 1,102 Washington 0 4,524 Wyoming 0 125

Higher education enrollment increases owe little to the new junior colleges: as of 1909, only

twenty of these schools existed. 68 By 1920, over hundred had opened, and by 1922, there were junior colleges operating in thirty-seven of the forty-eight states. 69

Following the Fresno Board of Education’s lead in establishing the first junior college in

California, twenty other two-year schools opened by 1921. 7071 Fresno acted through the 1907

Laminetti Act to establish its junior college, citing the need for an institution of higher education

for the city: the nearest college was roughly two hundred miles distant. 72 The 1917 and 1921

California Junior College Acts “authorized junior college districts to be organized entirely

independent of the secondary schools, and this form of parallel development continued for

68 Cohen and Brawer, 13. 69 Ibid. 70 Fountain, Ben E. and Terrence Al Tollefson. Community Colleges in the United States: Forty-nine State Systems (Washington, D.C.: The American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, 1989), 15l. 71 Ross, 147. 72 Cohen and Brawer, 19.

70 decades.” 73 California also allowed union college districts to be created so that these schools could raise their own money through bond measures. Further, in 1921 the Legislature acted upon its 1920 Special Committee on Education, which had suggested creating “supplemental junior colleges… at a number of well-located points in the state, these also to give lower division work, and their students to pass to…the state university for further collegiate or professional work.” 74

Several missions marked the path of junior colleges. One was “the desire to elevate universities by emphasizing research and scholarship;” the other “the desire to expand postsecondary education to increasing numbers of high school graduates.” 75 Reconciling these

“opposite forces” fell to junior colleges, yet the educational purposes or institutional necessity of junior colleges do not fully explain the boom in the chartering of such schools. On the contrary, one historian notes, “the driving force behind a new junior college was a city’s civil and commercial leadership.” 76 Pasadena, Long Beach, and Glendale created their own junior colleges in the 1920s. Los Angeles had three junior colleges by 1920, all co-located at local high schools: Hollywood (1911-1919), Los Angeles High (1912-1920), and Manual Arts (1917-

1918), which were immediately successful.77 In 1917, Los Angeles High School had the largest junior college in California, with 520 students enrolled—five times the number of the second place San Diego Junior College. Hollywood enrolled 108 students, and was the third largest in the state. 78 However, perhaps after securing a branch campus of the University of California, Los

Angeles felt little need to express civil or commercial leadership by opening junior colleges, and

73 Ibid. 74 Ross, 141. 75 “Community College Development in the United States.” Lincoln, NE: Nebraska Community College Association. Available Online: www.ncaa.state.ne.us . 76 Pedersen, 502; Cohen and Kisker, 52. 77 Carl G. Winter, History of the Junior College Movement in Los Angeles. Bureau of Junior College Education. Release No. 20, December 1964, http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED346902.pdf , pgs. 5-6. 78 Ibid.

71 the creation of the Southern Branch “probably caused the demise of the junior colleges in the Los

Angeles area.” 79 Later on in the 1920s and into the 1930s, Los Angeles pressed ahead with the new institutions simply because there was such a strong demand for them from prospective students.

Specific roles for junior colleges were difficult to establish in the 1920s and 1930s, because universities did not stop admitting freshmen and sophomores: therefore, “community colleges remained adjunctive well into the middle of the century.” 80 Ambitious plans to end admission of freshmen and sophomores to the University of California and Stanford University, for example, were met with a chilly reception. 81 The universities' support of the new junior colleges were riven with conflicts—these new institutions would lessen public demand for admission to the universities (thus allowing them to retain selective admissions policies), yet if too successful and popular, the universities might be forced to relinquish their freshmen and sophomore classes altogether. A 1915 policy paper assessing the transfer of junior college credits to universities stated dismissively: “Prophets who look forward to the time when the junior college will take over the whole of the University Freshmen and Sophomore years look far into the future.”82 At Stanford, President Jordan reflected, “I am looking forward to the time when the large high schools of the state in conjunction with the small colleges will relieve the two great universities from the expense and from the necessity of giving instruction of the first two university years… The only reasonable diversion is that which will take away students who do not need libraries or laboratories for their work. 83 Reflecting later findings on the academic achievements of freshmen and sophomores, a faculty committee predicted, “Underclassmen

79 Ibid. 80 Cohen and Brawer, 7. 81 Ross, 146. 82 Ibid. 83 Ibid.

72 coming from six-year high schools and small colleges with limited equipment and endowment, would not be as well trained or as far advanced as those who begin their college work here.” 84

Examples of Glendale Junior College; Los Angeles Junior College

Local communities such as Glendale, California grasped the opportunities provided by the legislature to create junior college districts. As with the entire Los Angeles metropolitan region, Glendale was growing, from 2,746 people in 1910 to 13,576 in 1920. 85 This growth, along with the transfer of the University of California’s Southern Branch to Westwood, sparked interest in a “junior college course” at Glendale’s high school. 86 Following the passage of a referendum in March, 1927, a junior college district was formed and trustees elected. 87 The principal of Glendale Union High School became principal of Glendale Junior College; at the time he noted, “we realize that we are part of a national experiment in popular education.” 88

Although for the first few years the junior college shared the high school’s physical plant

– confining college classes to the late afternoon after the high school day ended and allowing for little study space – Glendale’s new college was able to lure some students immediately, such as

Katherine S. McNamara. 89 McNamara was admitted to the University of California at Los

Angeles, but she decided to attend Glendale because she could then live at home and because the college was within walking distance. 90 Also, Glendale was cheaper than UCLA: McNamara used her wages from a tutoring job (French and German, which paid fifty cents an hour) to buy

84 Ibid. 85 Eberts, Mike. Glendale Junior College: The First Decade, 1927-37. Glendale, CA: Glendale Community College. Available Online: Glendale Community College (California) 86 Ibid., 2. 87 Ibid. 88 Ibid., 4. 89 Ibid. 90 Ibid.

73 books and incidentals. 91 Beatrice Haig could have attended the new junior college, as it opened the fall semester after she graduated from Glendale Union High School—then the only high school in town—yet she never seriously considered it. 92 The college shared the campus with her old high school, which she found distasteful. Haig decided to attend UCLA, which her family considered a much more affordable option than any of the local private colleges. 93

The appeal of the new junior colleges is difficult to understand when examining Glendale

Junior College’s history in its first ten years (1922-37). The school changed physical locations twice following its birth in Glendale Union High School’s west wing, its librarians struggled to piece together a library, a 1933 earthquake shook the town dramatically, and the Great

Depression darkened its economic skies. The Glendale Junior College Trustees were forced by state budget cuts to slash the school’s own budget from $206,100 in 1929-30 to $179,825 in

1930-31. 94

Yet there were still compelling reasons for student to choose to attend Glendale Junior

College. It was inexpensive compared with private colleges, which cost on average from $300 to

$1,000 per year; in contrast, Glendale cost only $29 per year (including fees, books, and other items). 95 As the economy was not producing jobs, school seemed a useful option; as Katherine

Talbot-Martin, a student in 1932-33 asked, “What else did you do?” 96 The federal government also recognized the social uses of higher education in this regard, agreeing to pay forty-five percent of the costs of a new campus for Glendale in 1935. 97 In the middle of the nation’s worst

91 Ibid. 92 Haig, Beatrice. UCLA Student Leaders: Beatrice Haig , transcript of an oral history conducted 1991 by Dale Trelevan, Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1990, 8. 93 Ibid. 94 Eberts, 3. 95 Ibid. 96 Ibid. 97 Ibid.

74 financial decade, the city of Glendale approved the bond issue financing a new campus by a vote of 7,707 to 1,848. 98 Glendale Union High School’s principal became the leader of Glendale

Junior College at its creation – this is representative of a general trend of public school superintendents and high school principals being “the master builders of the community college at the local level.” 99

California Public Higher Education and California's Public High Schools

A great surge in enrollments in high schools occurred at the turn of the century, as the economy produced more complex jobs requiring higher levels of education. In 1900, over half a million students attended the nation’s high schools. Within thirty years, nearly five million students were enrolled, as displayed in Table 9 below. 100

Table 9: Elementary and Secondary School Enrollments in the United States, 1900-1930 101

Year Total K-8 9-12 Grades 9-12 as (in thousands) percentage of 14- 17 year-olds 1900 17,072 16,422 650 10.6 1910 19,636 18,349 1,288 17.8 1920 24,049 21,292 2,757 35.0 1930 28,695 23,553 5,142 54.9

The expansion of higher education from mass to universal access, could not have occurred without this tremendous growth in the number of high school graduates. Certainly, the

University of California, state normal schools, and junior colleges would not have grown so quickly without the vital precondition of massive growth in public high school enrollments.

98 Ibid. 99 Dougherty, Kevin J. The Contradictory College: The Conflicting Origins, Impacts, and Futures of the community College . Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994, 136. 100 Fass, The Damned and the Beautiful, 124 n4. 101 U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States , 2003.

The University of California aided the development of high schools by first recruiting local students and then by accrediting state high schools. In the later 1800s, attendance in public elementary and secondary schools in California (and other western states) was booming. 102

From 1870 to 1900, attendance more than doubled, as seen in Table 10.103

Table 10: Enrollment in Regular Public Elementary and Secondary Schools, Western United States, 1870 to 1900.

1870 (estimated) 1900

Arizona 4,212 16,504 California 91,332 269,736 Colorado 4,357 117,555 Idaho 906 36,669 Iowa 341,938 566,223 Kansas 89,777 389,582 Minnesota 113,983 399,207 Missouri 330,070 719,817 Montana 1,657 39,430 Nebraska 23,265 288,227 Nevada 3,106 6,676 North Dakota 1,660 77,686 Oregon 21,000 89,405 South Dakota (still part of N. Dakota) 98,882 Utah 16,992 73,042 Washington 5,000 115,104 Wyoming 450 14,512

Various state universities, led by the University of Michigan, sought overall leadership of state systems of education, or at least desired control of these new high schools with regard to college admission requirements. At Lawrence, Kansas in 1891, the president of the University of Michigan, James Burrill Angell, praised the University of Kansas and other state universities and their relations with local high schools:

102 American Education 1870-1991: A Statistical Handbook (Dallas, TX: Contemporary Research Press, 1993), 42. 103 Ibid.

You are well aware that historically it has been true… the universities and colleges have sprung up before the common schools, and have helped kindle them into life. Though any college may be helpful to the common schools, yet the state universities by its very organization comes into the next natural and most helpful relations to them.. Not limiting themselves to the old classical curriculum of the New England type of college, they establish courses that easily link themselves to the different courses that the high schools desire to carry on. They not only furnish a large force of competent teachers for the high schools, but, by cultivating intimate relations with those schools, they exert a lifting power upon them, and attract a large number of students from them…wise is the state which by timely generosity to its university has touched … the mind and heart of every child within its borders. 104

It is perhaps not surprising that the president of the University of Michigan would praise partnerships between state universities and high schools; after all, Michigan had begun the practice of admitting students from high schools that the university had certified as offering appropriate preparatory work. 105 By the time of President Angell’s address, Minnesota, Iowa,

Missouri, and California had all adopted similar admissions processes, with Michigan as their model.

Universities offered guidance on curricular issues as well. As the high schools reacted more quickly to their communities’ practical desires, they offered modern languages and science courses (to the exclusion of Greek and Latin). As a result, the old classical course suffered at the university level: while a high school might pass its certification process, its graduates did not always require knowledge of Aristotle or Cicero. The colleges’ efforts to standardize a national preparatory curriculum centered on the National Education Association’s Committee of Ten, which was created in 1892. Among the model high school curricular requirements were four years of Latin, three years of Greek. The scientific subjects (physics, chemistry, botany, geography, astronomy and meteorology and anatomy and physiology) were only assigned a year

104 Wilson Sterling, ed. Quarter-Centennial History of the University of Kansas 1866-1891 (Topeka, KS: George W. Crane and Company, 1891), 23-24. 105 Paul Westmeyer, A History of American Higher Education (Springfield, IL: Charles C. Thomas Books, 1985), 95.

77 of study. 106 Coupled with the rise of a somewhat standard national college curriculum, the

University of California sought oversight authority over high school courses as well. Upon the request of any California public school principal, the Board of Regents of the University of

California offered to visit the school and report on its instructional quality.

In 1879, there were still only nineteen public high schools in the state, yet soon high schools were being feverishly constructed across the state and especially in the more populous northern areas. 107 Beginning in the 1900s, Los Angeles graduated large numbers of public high school students as well and a large building program was sped along. In 1919, fewer than ten high schools in Los Angeles were large comprehensive schools, while by 1940, over forty had been established. 108 UCLA drew heavily upon the graduating classes of these new schools during its early history. This task was made easier by the fact that in those years (and today) most college students attended schools in their home states: in 1897, 76 percent of students attended college in their home state; in 1923, 76 percent, and in 1931, 80 percent. 109

High schools in Los Angeles were the size of small colleges, and several had inherent advantages in sending their graduates on to college. There is a keen danger of anachronistic thinking in identifying which Los Angeles schools in the 1920s and 1930s were "college- focused." 110 Nevertheless, examining UCLA’s main feeder public high schools shows a rather modern attitude regarding college. In Los Angeles High School’s 1935 Handbook of Student

106 Rudolph, The American College and University , 286. 107 Charles J Falk, The Development and Organization of Education in California (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1968). 108 Los Angeles Unified School District, History of Schools (Chronology): 1855-1972, (Los Angeles: Los Angeles Unified School District, 1973). 109 Zook, George F. “The Residence of University and College Students.” School and Society 21 (1925), 415-422; Claudia Goldin and Lawrence Katz, ‘‘The Shaping of Higher Education: The Formative Years in the United States, 1890 to 1940.’’ NBER Working Paper no. 6537, April 1998, 52. 110 Patricia McDonough, Choosing Colleges: How Social Class and Schools Structure Opportunity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997), 7.

Information, a section titled “Choosing a College” is not much different from the college advising literature of today’s schools:

Re cognize that success in life is not necessarily determined by atten for that vocation. Whether you should go to college should be determined largely by your mental interests. One may have a good mind for practical success and yet have little fitness for advanced academic studies. If you have the type of mind that takes pleasure in intensive, persistent study of books, if you want the educated capacity to enjoy the best of intellectual and social life, or if you plan to enter a profession, you will profit by going to college. It is well to remember, however, that it is only as you have mentality, aspiration, purpose, and courage, that you will profit by a college course.

About seventy per cent of L. A. graduates enter some institution of higher education each year. Precaution should be taken by you in selecting your work, even in the earlier high school years, so that you will be protected in your college preparation. If early choice of a college is made, no difficulty should arise, as the work offered at Los Angeles High, if creditably completed, will adequately prepare you for any college in the country. 111

During UCLA’s first years of operation, several high schools competed with the new university for students (junior colleges were located on or adjacent to their campuses), prestige, and private financial support. Los Angeles High School, the first public high school in town, hired teachers who would have been college professors had there been jobs available; even as high school teachers they retained the aspirations and research interests of professors. For example, James Zacchaeus Gilbert, who graduated from McPherson College in Kansas in 1894, moved to Los Angeles ten years later in search of better job prospects, and began teaching biology and zoology at Los Angeles High School. From 1907 to 1909, he took volunteers from his classes to the newly discovered La Brea tar pits, which today are a six mile drive of twenty minutes’ duration down Wilshire Boulevard, far beyond the western terminus of the street trolley line. Gilbert and his students would get out at the end of the line, and walk nearly a mile the rest

111 Los Angeles High School 1935 Handbook of Student Information retrieved online September 18, 2008 from Los Angeles Unified School District Archives, http://www.lausd.k12.ca.us/Los_Angeles_HS/Archives/History/History.htm .

79 of the way. 112 L.A. High’s student government rivaled municipal governments in its power and effectiveness, going so far as to buy real estate property across the street and then donating it to the city for a World War I Memorial for the veterans of that war. 113 Hollywood during this period was still a city separate from Los Angeles, and Hollywood High School was a beloved hometown institution, considered a major draw for new residents. In 1912, before UCLA opened or the film industry revved up, a local newspaper editorialized, “the local high school has, without doubt, done more to bring desirable residents to this section than any other institution, climate of course excepted.” 114 As a historian of the school writes, “[B]y the early twenties, the hottest item in town was a ticket to a Hollywood High production…[Hollywood’s] citizens were starved for serious culture, and the school’s student actors and actresses filled the vacuum.” 115 Hollywood High School's graduates had an especially close affinity to UCLA, and supplied many of its early students. Cynthia Fry Jepsen, who "practically learned to walk on

Hollywood Boulevard," graduated from UCLA in 1926 and noted "a good number of people in the class of '26 were all from Hollywood [High School]." 116

Dr. William Snyder was principal of Hollywood High School for twenty years prior to his appointment in 1929 as the head of Los Angeles Junior College on UCLA's former campus on Vermont Avenue. Snyder had a great influence on his high school students. Snyder resented that his own high school in Maine had required students to learn Latin and Greek. He was a strong advocate of science in the curriculum and wrote a commonly used 10 th grade science

112 “McPherson Man Makes History at Tar Pits,,” http://www.mcphersonsentinel.com/article/20120118/NEWS/301189937 . 113 Matthew Allan Ides, “Cruising for Community: Youth Culture and Politics in Los Angeles, 1910-1970,” (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2009), unpublished dissertation, 47. 114 Hollywood Citizen , June 4, 1912. 115 John Blumenthal, Hollywood High: the History of America’s Most Famous Public School (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 69. 116 Cynthia Fry Jepsen, Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985 / interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young, 2000, 319.

80 textbook. A former student, James Lloyd (Hollywood HS '24; UCLA '28) also observed Snyder's influence in his peers' college choices. The University of California at Berkeley and Stanford were at the time the only two schools considered by his classmates, and Pomona College a distant third. The only reason Pomona was considered at all, Lloyd believed, "was due to the fact

[Snyder] thought a great deal of Pomona; I am sure that influenced his students. He had sent all of his children there, you see. Occidental I don't really remember being in the picture."117 Lucy

Guild Toberman said that Pomona was “a very brainy college but lacking in social activity and social reputation,” and that “nobody ever considered Occidental. It was a nice little school for the neighbors, and nobody thought it had any clout.” 118

Hollywood High and local high schools such as Van Nuys, Los Angeles and Polytechnic, provided UCLA with many of its student leaders. For example, every student body president had been a graduate of Hollywood High School prior to Dean McHenry’s election in 1931. 119 In the 1920s, at least, it was possible that the relatively small size of UCLA's Vermont Avenue campus and the relatively large size of Hollywood High School made for a more comfortable transition to college for its graduates. Elizabeth Franz Ahlm, a 1927 Hollywood graduate, explained, "[UCLA] wasn't that much bigger than Hollywood High School, so you didn’t feel at all lost there." 120 The UCLA-Hollywood High School exchange reached beyond the admissions office and student government elections. At least one sorority, Alpha Gamma Delta, owed its birth to a group of high school friends. Eleanor Lloyd Dees remembered, "it started out at

117 James W. Lloyd, “UCLA Student Leaders: James W. Lloyd.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1989, 1990 by David Gist. Collection 300/338. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 35. 118 Toberman, 16. 119 McHenry, 45. 120 Elizabeth Franz Ahlm, Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985 / interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young, 2000. Elizabeth’s father Dr. Shepherd Franz, was the chairman of UCLA's Psychology Department at the time, which may also explain her ease on campus.

[UCLA] with about five Hollywood High girls and then spread out." 121 It "spread out" with significant help from a UC Berkeley Alpha Gamma Delta alumnus, Delia Martin, who was then both the girls' vice principal at Hollywood High School and the sponsor of the new sorority branch. 122 Similarly, Porter Hendricks chose to pledge Sigma Alpha Epsilon because, as he put it, “birds of a feather flock together, and I knew several fellows there from Santa Monica High

School.” 123 Local philanthropists, such as Mira Hershey, offered gifts and assistance to both

UCLA and Hollywood High School without drawing any distinctions of difference regarding their relative prestige or importance. 124 According to philanthropists, just as with the Normal

School board of trustees, while a university would have been preferable to support, still, education was education.

Deep into the 1930s, UCLA students who were not graduates of the main feeder high schools felt a bit left out. Since she was a child playing on UCLA's first Vermont Avenue campus, Marjorie Chilstrom had wanted to go to college there. After graduating from Fairfax

High School in 1934, (which was not a main feeder school at this time) she enrolled in UCLA the following fall semester. She remembered how intimidated she felt, even though she had graduated from a local high school: "very few people from my high school, which was a very good academic high school, went on to university, and practically no one—no one that I knew— went to UCLA. So I really entered alone, and that was a spooky feeling in those days." 125 Cyril

121 Eleanor Lloyd Dees, Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985 / interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young, 2000, 167. 122 Ibid., 168. 123 Hendricks, 32. 124 Mira Hershey funded the first women’s dormitory at UCLA, and also helped to build Hollywood High School’s Performing Arts Center, which was a center of culture and entertainment in the town. Story of Hollywood , 110. 125 Marjorie Chilstrom, Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985 / interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young, 2000, 130.

Nigg graduated from Loyola High School in 1923 126 and although other students found UCLA and its snug Vermont Avenue campus to be a small-scale, intimate setting, Nigg recalled it differently:

[Loyola High School] was like a family thing. It was so close. I knew everybody. I knew everybody in the school. This was quite a contrast when I went to UCLA. The UCLA campus was three blocks this way and three blocks that way, all those buildings, three thousand students. I didn’t know anybody, and it was quite a lost feeling. I mean, the contrast was so tremendous. So as I cast about, there were maybe ten students that had come from Loyola that I knew. But ten out of three thousand you don’t see very often. 127

Racially Stratified Access to Public Higher Education in Southern California

White students comprised the great majority of both public school populations in Los

Angeles County and UCLA through the 1920s and 1930s. Most of these White students were from families that had recently moved to southern California from Midwestern states. As discussed in Chapter 2, from 1900 to 1930, Los Angeles differed greatly from cities like New

York, Boston, Philadelphia, and Chicago in the ethnic makeup of its White population. In the latter cities, at the end of the nineteenth century and in the beginning of the twentieth, “not only did the [public school] students increase dramatically in number but the kinds of students changed profoundly as well. Especially in urban schools, the overwhelming preponderance of

White Anglo-Saxon middle-class youngsters disappeared.” 128 In Los Angeles, at least until the

1930s, nearly the opposite was true.

Students of color—and in Los Angeles in the 1930s these were mostly Mexican

Americans, African Americans, Filipino Americans, Japanese Americans, and American

126 Loyola High School was originally founded as St. Vincent’s College in 1865, changing its name in 1919 to Loyola when it came under Jesuit control, and a high school, college, and law school were located on its campus until 1929, when the law school moved to a different downtown Los Angeles location and the undergraduate college moved to Westchester, where it exists today as Loyola Marymount University. 127 Cyril Nigg, Oral History Interview, Interview conducted in 1992, 1993 by Dale E. Treleven. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles for the State Government Oral History Program, California State Archives, 1993, 10-11. 128 Jeannie Oakes, Keeping Track: How Schools Structure Inequality (New Haven, CT; Yale University Press, 2005), 19-20.

Indians—faced difficult paths to higher education. In 1927, 65,527 students (10 percent of the state total) were of Mexican descent, and half of these students lived in Los Angeles County.

Further, in 1928, 32,000 students of Mexican descent were listed as students in the City of Los

Angeles’s schools. 129 In the 1927-28 school year, 2,869 students of Mexican descent (17 percent of the total) attended Orange County schools. In the Imperial Valley, famed for its great agricultural output, 36 percent of the student population was of Mexican descent. 130

Superintendent of City of Los Angeles Schools Susan Dorsey complained, “it is unfortunate and unfair for Los Angeles, the third largest Mexican city in the world, to bear the burdens of taking care educationally of this enormous group.” 131 This institutional resentment of Mexican

American students must have undermined efforts by individual teachers and families to help

Mexican American students go to college. As Gilbert Gonzalez explains, “as a group, Mexican children, indeed the entire Mexican community, were looked upon as misfits ruining an otherwise smoothly functioning educational system. None of us are inspired to do our best when we are made to feel that we are a burden on others, or that we are somehow misfits and don’t belong.”132

So despite comprising a sizable share of the public school population in this period, through the 1920s, in California, Mexican Americans rarely attended college.133 UCLA recorded only a dozen or so Mexican students being enrolled each year, and all of them listed their homes as in Mexico. The Mexican Voice , a local newspaper devoted to Mexican American issues, reported in 1941 that thirty students of Mexican descent had enrolled at UCLA that year, the

129 Wollenberg, 110; Gilbert González, “Racism, Education, and the Mexican Community in Los Angeles,” Societas 4 (1974), 299. 130 González, “Racism, Education, and the Mexican Community in Los Angeles,” 299. 131 Ibid. 132 Ibid. 133 Tudico, 141.

84 most ever. 134 Similarly, according to a recent study by University of Texas-Austin researchers

Julian Vasquez Heilig, Laurel Dietz, and Michael Volonnino, in 1937, Latino/a students comprised only 1.5 percent of enrollments at that flagship campus.135

Several factors possibly explain these low enrollment numbers of Mexican and Mexican

American college students. The first factor was segregation, sometimes by law, sometimes in fact, of Mexicans and Mexican Americans with respect to schools, swimming pools, restaurants, and theaters. Mexican American students were educated in inferior schools that were racially segregated by residential neighborhood districting and racially restrictive covenants, as in Los

Angeles County, or according to official policy, as in Orange County. 136 The second factor, closely tied to the ill effects of segregation, was the tremendous dropout rate of Mexican

American students. In the La Habra area (on the border of Los Angeles and Orange Counties),

“in 1934 a school district had 4,000 Spanish-surnamed students in the elementary schools, but only 165 in the high school(s). Of these only fifteen would make it to their senior year and usually fewer than three graduated.” 137 The third factor was the migratory nature of California agricultural work, which often uprooted Mexican American students, interrupting schoolwork, hurting classroom performance, ruining prospects for academic advancement, and ultimately leading to students' dropping out. César Chávez, for example, who attended public schools in the 1930s, remembered attending thirty-one schools before the sixth grade, the grade beyond which he did not advance. 138 By the time Mexican American students reached the eighth grade,

134 Ibid., 163. 135 Julian Vasquez Heilig, Laurel Dietz, and Michael Volonnino, “From Jim Crow to the Top 10% Plan: A Historical Analysis of Latina/o Access to a Selective Flagship University,” Enrollment Management Journal , Fall 2011, 83- 109, 89. 136 Douglas Monroy, Rebirth : Mexican Los Angeles, 199. Orange County operated fifteen “utterly segregated” elementary schools, intended to “purge immigrants’ children of Mexican language and custom and drill them in tasks appropriate to their presumed future roles—as laborers and housewives.” 137 Ibid. 138 Wollenberg, 114.

85 many were already sixteen years old, the age at which free, compulsory schooling ended in

California. 139 A fourth factor was curricular tracking, in which schools with large Mexican

American student populations specialized in vocational offerings, which did not prepare students for college. For example, in 1929, Roosevelt High School and Lincoln High School, both large comprehensive high schools located on the East Side of Los Angeles and serving racially mixed communities, offered 17 and 18 vocational courses, respectively, while University High School, a high school on the West Side of Los Angeles on the border with Santa Monica, served a primarily White community, and offered only one vocational class. 140

Asian American communities fared little better than other non-White populations in securing access to higher education, and struggled to fight injustice in the public schools.

Filipinos were not segregated in southern California schools by law, yet those attempting to attend local high schools faced informal segregation. Filipino students were encouraged by high school principals to restrict themselves to schools with large Asian enrollments. Racial harassment in Los Angeles against the Chinese community, particularly by the Ku Klux Klan, dampened higher education enrollments. Furthermore, judging from limited data, Chinese students attended junior colleges and state normal schools rather than the prestigious University of California’s campuses. In 1938, 36 Chinese high school graduates from Fresno high schools went on to college: 15 attended Fresno State College, eight attended junior colleges, three enrolled at Berkeley, with ten other students attending ten other institutions. 141

139 Ibid. 140 Gilbert González, “Racism, Education, and the Mexican Community in Los Angeles,” 299. University High School was renamed this in 1929, having formerly been known as Warren G. Harding High School. Harding had fallen out of favor since his death in office in 1923 owing to the Teapot Dome Scandal, in which Los Angeles oilman Edward L. Doheny had played a prominent part. 141 Weinberg, 29.

Japanese American college students in Los Angeles might have had greater educational opportunities in the 1930s than other students of color, but faced terrible frustrations and structural obstacles to career success. Japanese American students “were more numerous proportionally than White students...not saddled with quotas or other exclusory devices…[and] they were not barred from any academic field.” 142 However, most White employers in Los

Angeles would not hire Japanese Americans. College graduates were forced to find employment in Japanese owned businesses or else work as elevator attendants rather than as engineers or as paralegals and clerks rather than as attorneys. 143 According to Kojiro Onouro’s 1938 study of

161 Japanese American graduates of the University of California (1925-35), only 25 percent held positions “indicative of their training and education.” 144 In 1931, Wilfred Horiuchi, a UCLA senior, wrote in Shin Sekai (New World) , a Japanese community newspaper that the “the best thing one could do with the [college] degree was to lock it up in a trunk and forget that he or she had ever attended college.” 145

In the late 1920s, African American students began to be sent to relatively segregated schools, and at these schools, they were encouraged to take vocational, not college preparatory courses. 146 Future Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley remembered the counseling he had received as a junior high school student:

When I was preparing my program for the 8 th and 9 th grade in junior high school, I had to make a choice between academic or industrial courses. When I said I wanted to take an academic course, because I knew that would be necessary in order to go to college, this counselor said to me, “Don’t waste your time. You’ll just break your heart. You’re doomed to be denied that opportunity to go to college. You ought to prepare yourself for a job. Take some studies that are going to lead to manual labor because that’s about as

142 Ibid., 56. 143 Ibid. 144 David K. Yoo, Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1929-49 , Champagne: University of Illinois Press 2000, 33. 145 Ibid. , 27. 146 Judith Raftery, “Missing the Mark: Intelligence Testing in Los Angeles,” History of Education Quarterly 28(1) , Spring 1988, 73-93, 89.

much as you’re going to be able to hope for”…I don’t suppose that was out of any sense of prejudice or an expression of discrimination. It was a reality as far as that counselor was concerned, and I suppose that the counselor was trying to avoid heartbreak for me. 147

Counselors did not help UCLA graduate James LuValle much either: “in those days,” he recalled, [at Polytechnic High in the 1930s] we didn’t have counselors…one of your teachers was your counselor, an actual teacher who had you. Mine was Professor Schaffer,” who had her

Ph.D. in mathematics and who supported LuValle’s efforts to attend CalTech. 148 College-bound students understood their chances of success were improved if they attended more prestigious and more academically rigorous schools, the feeder schools for colleges. One student who did attend such a feeder school was Miriam Matthews, the first black librarian in Los Angeles, who attended 14 th Street Intermediate School and Los Angeles High School, which had a strong college preparatory course. She then attended the Southern Branch for her first two years of college before transferring in 1924 to the main University of California campus at Berkeley. 149

Matthews transferred because, “attending college in my hometown seemed like a continuation of high school,” a distasteful proposition for her as she had not liked Los Angeles High School, where she found it difficult to forge friendships. 150 Ralph Bunche, also disliked attending his racially diverse Jefferson High School, being denied membership in the Ephebian Society, the school’s most prestigious honor society, because of his race. 151 He recalled the episode in later years, and the episode shows the difficult and complex racial climate he had to navigate to excel in Los Angeles and at UCLA:

147 Tom Bradley, The Impossible Dream Oral History Transcript/ interviewed by Bernard Galm. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles , 1984, 30. 148 LuValle, 7. 149 The Black Women Oral History Project: From the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College , ed. Ruth Edmonds Hill (Westport, Conn.: Meckler, 1991), 388. Miriam's brother, Charles Matthews, later graduated from the Boalt School of Law (UC Berkeley), the only African American in his class. 150 Ibid. 151 Charles P. Henry, “Introduction, “ in Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings (Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 1995), 3.

Our grandmother took my sister and me to Los Angeles and a new life. It was there that I had my earliest experiences with racial prejudice - my mother's advice has been a constant source of strength through all such experiences. One of the first was when in my senior year in high school, my race and not my grades had kept me out of the city-wide high school honor society - the Ephebian Society, I believe it was called. The names of the prospective honorees were read off at a meeting of the Senior Class held in one of the class rooms. Since my grades were the highest in the class, I had expected to be included. When my name was omitted, I instinctively assumed it was because of my race, and so did some of my classmates and at least one of my teachers, who immediately expressed to me their indignation that my color should have been held against me. I was humiliated and deeply wounded, and on angry impulse decided to leave school, abandon graduation and never return. But after a while I thought of that talk with my mother, subdued my emotions, decided that I could get along without the honor society, and finally found myself delivering the commencement address at graduation. I assumed that the latter was a "consolation prize" for me. Naturally, my experiences with racial prejudice have never been pleasant, but I have never let any of them trouble me very much or cause me to become embittered. 152

Years later, one of Bunche’s former Jefferson High School teachers, Ada Ernst, wrote a remarkable letter to him confessing why he had been snubbed:

You will never know how my heart ached and how hurt I was when I learned the results of the vote for Ephebians in your class. You were the outstanding one in that class and deserved first place—by every measuring rod. Yet prejudice overrode truth, I am sorry to say. I fought valiantly for you, but some others had greater weight than my judgment. I am free now to tell you what I wanted to that last morning, but we were pledged to dead secrecy. I would have been called a traitor…but at last, I am free to tell you that I did not stoop to prejudice. 153154

Prejudice against Black students was not restricted to the classroom. Beyond the Ephebian

Society snub, which is recorded for history, there must have many other slights and indignities resulting from the informal, yet very real, segregation that existed at the time. Eugene Conser, who was in Bunche’s UCLA class of 1927 recalled, “the prominent minority person on campus

152 Ralph J. Bunche, “The Best Advice I Ever Had,” 1954. Letters and Personal Papers of Ralph J. Bunche, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles. 153 Ada Ernst letter to Ralph J. Bunche, July 6, 1949. Brian Urquhart Collection of Material about Ralph Bunche, Box 26, Folder 4. UCLA Library Department of Special Collections. 154 In 1955, Phineas Singer, the student who was selected for the Ephebian Society wrote: “I thoroughly agree with Dr. Bunche that he was the outstanding student of our class…I cannot say that the choice was biased because of his color, though that could have happened since at that time Jefferson High School was perhaps not over 20-25 percent colored…I was very sorry that I was selected in his place.” Phineas Singer letter to Ephebian Society’s 57 awardees of Winter 1922, February 25, 1955, Letters and Personal Papers of Ralph J. Bunche, Department of Special Collections, University of California, Los Angeles.

89 was Ralph Bunche. He was always highly thought of and was always invited to social affairs but never, I think, chose to came. I think that was his decision, that’s all.” 155 Perhaps it was Bunche’s decision not to attend such events, and perhaps he did not feel truly welcome. It is not clear, but certainly college memories can be colored just as much by our social lives as the classes we take.

The Los Angeles Public Library has a wonderful photograph in its archives of Ralph Bunche and two friends at the beach in 1923. 156

When Bunche was in high school, the only public beach that welcomed Black beachgoers was

Bruces’ beach, a two-block area at Manhattan Beach that had been bought and developed by

Charles and Willa Bruce. 157 In 1924, after a campaign of harassment by local residents and even the Ku Klux Klan, the City of Manhattan Beach condemned Bruces’ Beach and closed it. 158

Then the only beach not subject to informal racial segregation was an area around Ocean Park,

155 Conser, 48. 156 Ralph Bunche and friends at the beach, 1923. Shades of L.A.: African American Community/ Los Angeles Public Library. 157 Lawrence Culver, “America’s Playground: Recreation and Race,” in A Companion to Los Angeles, ed. William Deverell and Greg Hise (Hoboken, New Jersey: Blackwell Publishing, 2010), 430. 158 Ibid.

Santa Monica, known to local Whites disparagingly as “the Inkwell,” near where Crescent Park is located today on Ocean Avenue between Bay and Bicknell Streets. 159 As history Allison Rose

Jefferson explains, "It was self-segregated. This is where [African American] people felt safe, where they wouldn't be harassed and could meet other African Americans to enjoy the beach." 160

While historians of education understandably focus their attention on racism on campus, college students live much of their lives in the world outside campus boundaries, then and today, and we cannot gain a full picture of the racial campus climate on UCLA’s campus in the 1920s and

1930s without, for example, assessing basic issues such as where kids could go to the beach. 161 It was not only African Americans who were informally blocked from beaches; Mexican American high school students in the 1940s reported that they were warded off from beaches by police and local White homeowners. 162 Being blocked by de facto segregation, Mexican American children swam in an oft-polluted Los Angeles River or in a water filled quarry known as the Sleeping

Lagoon, known for the Sleepy Lagoon Trial of 1942 where Mexican American teenagers were wrongfully convicted of murder for a killing committed there. 163

Mayor Bradley was slated to attend Jefferson High, his neighborhood school, yet he believed his chances to attend college would suffer as a result, that he would be pushed into vocational training. Bradley therefore adopted a clever transfer stratagem, explaining “since my

159 Ibid. 160 Martha Groves, “Unearthing history in a beach cleanup,” Los Angeles Times , September 15, 2012, http://articles.latimes.com/2012/sep/15/local/la-me-inkwell-beach-cleanup-20120915 . 161 Beaches, palm trees, cool ocean breezes—these are well documented to soothe anxiety and stress, and so for students of color (especially Southern Californians) trying to cope with racial battle fatigue, opportunities for rest, relaxation, and leisure at the beach must have been just as crucial in Bunche’s time as today. The effects of racial battle fatigue are set forth in various studies, and comprehensively in William A. Smith, Tara J. Yosso, and Daniel J. Solórzano, “Challenging Racial Battle Fatigue on Historically White Campuses: A Critical Race Examination of Race-Related Stress” in Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominately White Colleges and Universities . Ed. Christine A. Stanley (Bolton, MA: Anker Publishing, 2006). 162 Culver, 430. Culver also reports that Japanese and Chinese Americans “frequented beaches and parks as regularly as Anglos did” and “usually encountered less overt racism than African Americans,” though of course this just prior to the United States’ internment of its Japanese American citizens on the West Coast in the spring of 1942. 163 Ibid., 431.

91 mother worked just three blocks from Poly [Polytechnic] High, I was able to use that address and to work there periodically and thereby have a logical excuse for transferring [schools.]” 164

Bradley’s instincts proved good, as he was later recruited to attend UCLA by James LuValle, then a UCLA track star and a Polytechnic graduate himself.

James LuValle, like Bradley, was zoned to attend Jefferson High School just like his sister Mayme McWhorter, but he went to Polytechnic High School instead, recalling that [Poly] was the only school in the city that offered really top-notch science courses and math courses.

And if you had the grades, you could go there. Otherwise you couldn’t. You could go from any junior high school in the city, if you had the grades and could convince them that’s what you wanted.” 165 LuValle explained that in mathematics, chemistry, and physics there was at least one teacher who held a Ph.D., and so “it was quite a demanding school.” 166 LuValle took the long view in choosing a high school because he wanted to attend CalTech, and so sought the most rigorous curriculum. Therefore his views on the main college preparatory high schools in Los

Angeles—and at the time UCLA’s main feeder schools—are vital historical evidence:

L.A. [High School] was a very good school too, but it didn’t have this extreme emphasis in science and math. But it was an excellent school. It was the archrival of L.A. Poly. L.A. High would have been a good school to go to if I hadn’t been so interested in the sciences. Manual Arts was certainly a good school, as was Fairfax. I would say those four schools—and Hollywood High—those five schools were probably the best schools in Los Angeles at that time… at that time, the junior high schools [had] only two tracks really. You were going to go on to high school and college or you weren’t…but I knew I was going to go to college. After all, my mom said, “You should go to college.” Therefore I knew I was going to college. 167

164 Bradley, 30. Jefferson High School, for example, was the only school in Los Angeles in which training courses were offered on how to do maids’ work—and this was the school white residents requested that African American students be forced to attend. 165 LuValle, 10. 166 Ibid. 167 LuValle, 8-9.

Like Bunche at Jefferson, James Luvalle was denied the Ephebian award at Polytechnic High

School because the Society was restricted to White students. 168 The faculty then created a brand new prize, the Willis A. Dunn Gold Medal, to be awarded to the outstanding all-around student in the senior class, with LuValle as the first winner. 169 In both cases, we can observe a complex racial atmosphere where racial exclusion was pitted against a desire for inclusivity, and it is out of this climate that talented students like Bunche and LuValle emerged, scarred by racism.

Opportunities to attend a public college or university steadily increased in California through the 1930s. The University of California and state normal schools—along with junior colleges, special exceptions analyzed in a different chapter—fanned out across the state and proved popular institutions. Federal support, demand for college from growing numbers of high school graduates, a need for trained schoolteachers, and interest in agricultural training all contributed to the growth of public higher education in California. By 1919, Los Angeles was certainly ready for its own public university. Yet students of color were for the most part blocked from entry to UCLA because they were denied access to the main feeder high schools, or had high dropout rates, or were simply not expected to want to attend college. The overwhelming White majority at UCLA was taken for granted, and this is in large part due to the large White majorities in the local college-focused high schools, a situation that was likely also taken for granted.

168 LuValle, 10. 169 Ibid.

Chapter 4: Private Higher Education in Los Angeles, 1880-1919

In Southern California, until the Southern Branch of the University of California opened in 1919, college was a product provided only by the private sector. 1 In large American cities, this was not unusual for the time; for example, Chicago's main colleges and universities were all privately operated until 1935, when the University of Illinois established a branch campus in the city. 2 In fact, most American colleges and universities were privately operated, and as late as

1950, the majority of college students attended these institutions.3 The strength of the private sector in Los Angeles runs counter to the story in the rest of the American West, though, as historically private colleges and universities played a minor role in the region, and even today,

17 percent of college students attend private colleges and universities nationwide compared to only 8 percent of college students in the West. 4 However, as historian John Thelin has noted,

Looking back to the turn of the century, private institutions recognized that the greater Los Angeles area’s population boom would create a need for collegiate and professional education. And, private institutions, notably USC and the eventual Claremont Colleges, were the ones which addressed themselves to various aspects of this regional demand. 5

Private colleges in Southern California persisted (or not) based upon the fortunes of the local economy, the path of transportation networks (such as the transcontinental railroad and much later the streetcar lines that linked Los Angeles to its hinterlands), the population growth of

1 "College" as mentioned here does not include teacher training programs offered at the State Normal School of Los Angeles, which opened in 1881 in downtown near the present site of the Los Angeles Central Public Library. The term refers to postsecondary education leading to a bachelor of arts or sciences, or other four-year degree. 2 Stephen Diner, A City and its Universities: Public Policy in Chicago, 1892-1919 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1980). The University of Chicago, Northwestern University, Loyola University of Chicago, and DePaul University all offered bachelor's degrees. Each institution took different paths to university status: the University of Chicago emerging fully formed in the 1890s as a research university, Northwestern transforming from college to university over six decades of uneven growth, and Loyola and DePaul pursuing distinct paths influenced mainly their Roman Catholic leaders: the Society of Jesus ("Jesuits") and Diocese of the City of Chicago, respectively. 3 American Education, 1870-1991: A Statistical Handbook (Dallas: Contemporary Research Press, 1993), 76. 4 Longanecker, 258. 5 John Thelin, “Life and Learning in Southern California: Colleges in Popular Culture,” History of Education Quarterly 15 (1), Spring 1975, 112.

94 their surrounding communities and the development of their endowments. Overpowering all other needs was the colleges’ desperate thirst for students: until this thirst was slaked by a general growth in interest in college going, no school could be sanguine about its chances of survival. These institutional survival stories form the backbone of this chapter.

In the 1960s, Reynar Banham observed Los Angeles as a city seeming in constant motion, because of the number and scale of its busy new freeways. 6 Despite the idea of a college campus as being in a permanent fixed place, private colleges in Los Angeles were always moving locations or making ambitious plans to move. In the swiftly changing real estate landscape of the late 1800s and early 1900s, colleges, just like corporations and businesses, sought to gain competitive advantage over their peers and to make use of gifts by individual benefactors, trying to place their institutions on firm footing for the future.

Small denominational colleges had been founded across the nation throughout the nineteenth century, and Los Angeles' first colleges, opened mainly in the 1880s, fit this pattern.

Southern California's private colleges had been created to boost the civic fortunes of particular small towns and so service to these small communities was central to their missions. In analyzing such private institutions, John Thelin warns that "extending the [present-day] public- private dichotomy into the late nineteenth century can be misleading if not simplistic." 7 Thelin further remarks on the general importance of the history of California's private colleges:

While considerable attention has been given to the well-publicized University of California saga, it has been necessary to review the UC story to break the hegemony it has held on popular conceptions of higher education in the state. Discussions of the University of Southern California's 'Extended University Plan' of the 1890s and the federated Claremont Colleges Plan of the 1920s have suggested that the UC saga

6 Banham, The Architecture of Four Ecologies , 18. 7 John R. Thelin, "California and the Colleges," California Historical Quarterly (two parts) Part I: (Summer 1977) vol. LVI, no. 2, pp. 140-163; Part II: (Fall 1977) vol. LVI, no. 3, pp. 230-249, 238.

however admirable, has not been the sole force in shaping higher education in California. 8

It is vital, therefore, to examine the early histories of these private colleges. Through brief historical analyses of colleges, the broader issues and themes relating to higher education in

Southern California during the period will be raised into sharper relief.

The pace of private college founding grew following the Civil War and accelerated until

1900. The twin purposes supporting college creation were to boost development of new towns and to spread various religious denominations, Protestant churches in particular. 9 Aside from desires to spread Protestantism in various forms, a historian has argued that "a second pattern of founding, usually at the initiative of individuals, occurred largely on what geographer D.W.

Meinig has termed 'the speculative frontier.’ In this case initiatives to found colleges were part of the competitive development of rival settlements—a kind of prospective boosterism." 10 The founding of Southern California’s private colleges followed this general pattern. As seen in

Table 11, Occidental College was founded by Presbyterians, Pomona College by New England

Congregationalists, the University of Southern California by Methodists, Whittier College by

Quakers, and Redlands College by Baptists—yet all were created to promote their host towns and to boost land values.

8 Ibid., 246. 9 Roger L. Geiger, "The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850-1890,"127-152, in The American College in the Nineteenth Century (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000), 135. 10 Ibid.

Table 11: Private Institutions of Higher Education, Southern California, 1880-1919

Institution Date Founded Site Denomination

St. Vincent's 1865 Los Angeles Roman Catholic College (Loyola College of Los Angeles) 11 The University of 1880 Los Angeles Methodist Southern California Occidental 1887 Los Angeles; Eagle Presbyterian University of Los Rock (1914) Angeles (Occidental College) Pomona College 1887 Claremont Congregational Lordsburg College 1891 La Verne Church of the (La Verne College) Brethren Throop Polytechnic 1891 Pasadena Nondenominational Institute (California (1920: Caltech) Institute of Technology: “Caltech”) Whittier College 1901 Whittier Quaker Redlands College 1909 Redlands Baptist

These schools, including the non-denominational Throop Polytechnic Institute (predecessor of the California Institute of Technology), were different institutions, founded for different purposes and yet all struggling with the common problem of survival during a period in which very few students went to college. 12 Affordability was of particular importance in students' choosing public over private institutions. Several students quoted below ended up attending

UCLA over USC mainly due to the price difference. Private colleges that were farther away, such as Stanford, could not lure many middle-class students from southern California in large part because of the cost of tuition.13 The national average in 1933 for tuition plus associated fees

11 Later merged with Marymount College to form Loyola Marymount University. 12 The California Institute of Technology (“Caltech”) was known under various names, including Throop Academy and the Throop Institute, prior to 1920. 13 McHenry, 3.

97 was $265 per year for private colleges, and only $61 for public institutions for students attending in-state. On average, private schools charged higher costs in room and board than their public peers. 14 College was still a luxury for most people.

By 1919, private colleges in Southern California could not meet the rapidly growing demand for higher education in the area. Pomona College and Occidental College, for example, simply lacked the resources, physical plants, and campus space to handle all the students who wanted to attend; where they had previously scoured the state and country for applicants, each now sharply limited their admissions. Southern Californian students exceeded the national trend of higher college-going rates. The region needed ever greater numbers of professionally trained graduates, skilled workers, and bureaucrats for bigger corporate and public entities. More public high schools were built, graduating more students who sought to attend college, and preferably to attend public colleges.

As the First World War ended and the United States rapidly demobilized its armed forces, college administrators and faculty looked forward to the Army leaving campus, and demobilized soldiers returning as civilian students. Peacetime promised renewal and great growth for higher education, yet Southern California private colleges faced uncertain futures. To begin with, they faced new competition from the state, in the form of the Southern Branch of the

University of California. Some private colleges, such as Occidental and Pomona, therefore sharpened their institutional missions, capped the size of their student bodies, and promoted the desirability of the small liberal arts school model. USC, however, took a different approach, plunging ahead with an ambitious plan to expand its professional and graduate schools, expanding its enrollments and endowments. Caltech continued its singular mission to become a

14 Goldin and Katz, 50.

98 world-leading research institute, recruiting its students nationally and hiring professors from across the nation and the world.

University of Southern California

Of all the colleges in Los Angeles, USC's history most closely parallels that of its host city, with both sharing the twin themes of ambition and improvisation. 15 Just prior to the

University of California’s authorizing the creation of its Southern Branch, the Los Angeles Times proclaimed that USC “is part of the city and the city is part of it,” and that the university “has grown with the city.” 16 USC was founded in 1880, with Marion Bovard as president, fifty-three students and ten professors.17 USC selected the exact founding day, September 4, for its historical significance; it was ninety-nine years after the Spanish founded the village El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora la Reina de Los Angeles, (which formed the core of the city charted in 1850).

A local newspaper exclaimed, “the establishment of this institution marks an era in the progress of the people of the Pacific Coast. It has outrun the railway, and established itself before the connecting link has been made between the Mississippi and the Southern California coast.” 18 Of course, the fruits of civilization were not all quite ripe yet. For example, in 1882, Los Angeles' fire alarm system “consisted of [citizens'] firing of pistols, shotguns, and cannon until the fire department took note." 19

Methodists were USC's primary sponsors; however, the first board of trustees received donations of land from Episcopalians, Catholics, and Jews. The men who donated USC the land for its campus were Ozro Childs, John Downey, and Isais Hellman, who were Episcopalian,

15 Starr, Material Dreams, 151. 16 Los Angeles Times , May 26, 1918. 17 "Timeline of Key Events and Highlights in USC's History." Retrieved from http://www.usc.edu/about/history/#timeline , August 20, 2008. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid. 1882 was also the year electric lights were first installed on city streets.

Roman Catholic, and Jewish, respectively. They gave 308 acres to USC's Board of Trustees, who had all been chosen by the Methodist Episcopal Conference, and were themselves, of course, Methodists. 20 Downey explained the purpose of his donation:

When the University of Southern California was projected, I donated to them property in Los Angeles which probably could bring a million dollars at the present time. The Catholic bishop sent for me and wanted to know if I had left the church. I told him no, but the work these men were doing was just as acceptable in the sight of God as the work of our church. 21

As Los Angeles rapidly grew throughout the later nineteenth century, its need for doctors, lawyers, dentists, pharmacists, teachers, accountants, and other professionals grew accordingly.

USC became a "city university," or rather, “accepted the role of the urban service university,” and strove to educate the classes of trained professionals that Los Angeles needed. 22 USC's leaders also contemplated extending their campus to other parts of Southern California. These plans included a fine arts college in San Diego or in Ensenada; university branches planned at

Ramona, Rialto, Glendora, Elsinore, Montalvo, and Monrovia; possible northern branches in

Ventura, Nordhoff, San Luis Obispo, and Santa Maria; a graduate school in Whittier; a polytechnic school in Inglewood; and an astronomical observatory on Mount Wilson. 23 Money simply did not exist for all (or any, actually) of these plans. 24 USC’s main funding source was tuition money, which led President vonKleinSchmid to grow student enrollments through the

1920s in order to pay for an expansion of the physical plant. These extra tuition dollars could

20 Manuel P. Servin and Iris H. Wilson, Southern California and its University: A History of USC, 1880-1964 (Los Angeles: The Ward Ritchie Press, 1969), 5-6. 21 Ibid., 11. 22 Starr, Material Dreams , 152, and Thelin, “Life and Learning in Southern California,” 112. 23 Servin and Wilson, 29-30. 24 Hill, Laurance L., Six Collegiate Decades: The Growth of Higher Education in Southern California (Los Angeles: Security-First National Bank, 1929), 81-82. USC was prepared to fund the observatory project, and indeed, ordered the massive observatory lens from a local craftsman, yet the university’s funding for the project (consisting of a lot worth $50,000 in downtown Los Angeles) dried up when the real estate market crashed in the late 1880s and the lot became nearly worthless. Without predictable funding, whether through a large endowment or from state support, USC was handicapped in its abilities to make its institutional dreams a reality.

100 cover campus improvements, but were insufficient for ambitious expansion plans across southern

California. Without public funding, USC's faculty and administrators learned quickly that improvisation was the best method to conduct its growth. 25

The University of Southern California transformed itself from a small liberal arts college of 329 students in 1903 to a sizable university by 1920, at which time the enrollment was 4,600 students. 26 This coincided with the population growth of Los Angeles; from 1900 to 1910 the city tripled in size, from 1910 to 1920, from 102,000 people to 319,000. 27 The university and the city shared much of the same history because USC was located in the central part of the new

Metropolis. 28 USC considered itself a “community-service institution” because of the tradition of local benefactors’ support and this close geographical position.29 In 1910, Abbot Kinney

(founder of Venice, California and its famous canals) continued in the tradition of local support of the university by giving land in Venice for the Venice Marine Biological Station of Southern

California. 30 Marine biology courses were instituted at the university; and the Venice city trustees made the Venice pier and surrounding waters a “biological reservation.” 31

There were several notable innovations in curriculum at USC in its early years. Most important was the university's development beyond a typical liberal arts college catalog of courses. In the late 1800s, professional schools of law and medicine were located mainly in cities 32 , and as Los Angeles became a city, it followed this trend. USC established Southern

California's first professional schools in medicine (1885), dentistry (1897), and pharmacy (1905), and it acquired the Los Angeles Law School in 1898, with USC's first law degree granted in

25 Servin and Wilson, 50. 26 Ibid., 51. 27 Ibid., 52. 28 Ibid., 68. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid., 70. 31 Ibid. 32 Geiger, "The Era of Multipurpose Colleges," 152.

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1901. Through these schools, the university offered Los Angeles (and other Southern California) students the only place where they could receive professional training in these fields. 33

University training brought definite rewards immediately: for example, in the law school's early years, its graduates were admitted to the California bar without being required to take the bar examination. 34 A College of Pharmacy followed in 1906, and new pharmaceutical students were able to take classes during day or night sessions so they could continue working jobs in local pharmacies. 35 Another important curricular development at USC occurred in 1911, when the university received state accreditation and therefore could award teaching credentials and

Master’s degrees in education. 36 USC's School of Education, which had been operating as a full academic department for nine years, formally opened in 1918. Finally, in 1920, the first business school in Southern California was established at USC.

Through its graduate programs, USC helped not only to build the ranks of professionals in the region, but to assemble a small cohort of graduate students of color. Though their numbers were small, their influence was significant. One family's example helps to illustrate the point. John Alexander Sommerville, a Jamaican immigrant, graduated from USC's College of

Dentistry first in his class. Sommerville's successes came despite severe duress and prejudice: on the first day of class, the other students presented the dean, Garrett Newkirk, with an ultimatum—they would all drop the class unless Sommerville was removed. Their informal action ignored USC's 1885 declaration that "no student would be denied admission because of race, color, religion, or sex," and their demands were denied. During the meeting with the Dean,

Sommerville rebuked his peers, declaring:

33 Servin and Wilson, 68. 34 Ibid., 88. 35 Ibid., 85. 36 Ibid., 75.

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I would hardly expect to encounter race prejudice and intolerance in an institution of higher learning. I am here today for the same purpose you are—to seek an education leading to a profession through which I can minister to human needs. You are conspiring to keep me from that goal, for no other reason than that the color of my face is different from yours. Many of you aspire to be leaders in your chosen line. In later years, when you achieve your objective and become mature in thought, you may have reason to be ashamed that during your college days you placed a stumbling block in the pathway of one seeking the same opportunity. 37

Sommerville opened up a dental practice in downtown Los Angeles, and was the first

African American member of the Los Angeles Chamber of Commerce.38 Sommerville married

Vada Watson in 1912, who three years later became the first African American woman graduate of the USC's dentistry school and the first woman dentist in Los Angeles. John and Vada

Sommerville added vital public contributions beyond their dentistry. Vada Sommerville helped to launch the Los Angeles Urban League, and in 1914, the Los Angeles chapter of the National

Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) was chartered in the

Sommervilles' home. Though NACCP founder WEB Du Bois had difficulties in forming close friendships, "he felt at home with the Somervilles in Los Angeles." 39 In 1927, on Central

Avenue—the center of African American culture in Los Angeles at the time—the Sommervilles built the Hotel Sommerville, the first hotel in the city intended especially for African Americans, built to lure the NAACP to Los Angeles for its national conference. Thanks to the Du Bois family’s friendship with the Somervilles and their wonderful new hotel, in 1928, the NAACP held their conference in Los Angeles. 40 In 1948, Vada Somerville helped to establish the

Stevens House, a racially integrated cooperative house for women students at UCLA, which

37 University of Southern California. African American 2007-2008 Resource Handbook . Available online at http://www.usc.edu/student-affairs/black_cultural_center/images/AARH2007_2008.pdf , 6. 38 Ibid. 39 Douglas Flamming, "The Star of Ethiopia and the NAACP : Pageantry, Politics, and the African American Community of Los Angeles,” in Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920's. Tom Sitton and William Deverell, eds. (University of California Press: Berkeley, CA, 2001): 145-160, 156. 40 Ibid., 157.

103 operated from 1949 to 1992. Vada Somerville observed no silly cross-campus USC/UCLA rivalry when committing to help these students, but clearly understood the need for students of color to be supported in their college years, whatever college they attended.

Los Angeles was car crazy quickly, and by 1916, Los Angeles County was home to one third of California's automobiles. 41 USC became “the first institution of its kind in the world to recognize the importance of the automobile” through a university class on driver’s education, available to both male and female students. 42 Warren S. Bovard, the university comptroller and son of George Bovard, the university’s first president, explained the importance of the program, stating “modern education embraces everything that is a means for the end of the all-around development of the man or woman, and knowledge of automobiles is certainly a factor in the shaping of all the powers of the student.” 43

For decades, USC managed to avoid local competition from the University of California, fighting in the legislature against the establishment of a state branch university. President Bovard took the battle to the newspapers in 1910:

If we remember that other colleges are with us in Southern California, such as Occidental, Pomona, Whittier, Redlands, St. Vincents – Loyola, Throop [California Institute of Technology], together with our state-sustained normal schools in Los Angeles and San Diego… there is really no crying need for another state university. To establish and sustain such an institution… would entail enormous expense. The University of California at Berkeley now receives one- twelfth of the revenue of the state and requires more… 44

41 Francis M. Hugo, "Car Registrations' New High Record." Los Angeles Times , October 15, 1916, s5. In the same column, University of California President Benjamin Wheeler was reported to be "considering taking steps to prevent students from bringing their cars to the university" because "too many of the students use their cars to 'show off.'" 42 Servin and Wilson, 70. 43 Ibid., 71. 44 Ibid., 77.

104

Such arguments helped to delay the creation of a southern branch of the University California, but only until 1919.

As USC’s major source of income was tuition in the 1920s, it enrolled more students in order to bring in more tuition dollars, and this led to a perception in the area that USC might be sacrificing academic quality in favor of higher enrollments, and that USC was a football factory concerned only with sports. In the late 1920s, James LuValle, a track star at Polytechnic High

School who later attended UCLA, was being heavily recruited by USC. Howard Jones, USC’s football coach, asked LuValle what he planned to major in, and LuValle said he planned to study chemistry, but was worried USC’s offerings were not rigorous enough, and suggested USC should follow Caltech’s example. Jones replied, “Well, you tell us what you want [and] we’ll change it.” 45 LuValle recalled, “That convinced me that the athletic department…had too much say in what could take place in the academic department, and so I wasn’t going to go there, period.” 46

In order to compete in the new higher education landscape of Southern California, USC expanded both its physical plant and enrollments. While UCLA added the third and fourth years to is B.A. curriculum and moved to Westwood, USC tripled its enrollments (from 5,635 in 1921 to 16,185 in 1932) and almost doubled its faculty (283 in 1921 to 481 in 1932). 47 USC’s relatively high tuition did not attract only well-to-do students. USC students in the 1920s and

1930s were hardworking, encouraged by the administration to work part-time jobs while in school. Edith Weir, a USC secretary, related that “the general state of mind and health of those who are employed part-time compares favorably with those who have too much time to waste.” 48

45 LuValle, 13. 46 Ibid. 47 Los Angeles Times , 48 Los Angeles Times , November 1, 1925.

105

According to Weir, she received 1,200 calls for men and 1,000 for women from local employers

regarding part-time jobs. 49

Occidental College

Founded in 1887, the Occidental University of Los Angeles (later known as Occidental

College) was the brainchild of Southern California Presbyterians. 50 Local churchgoers donated

fifty acres of land and seed money for the new school.51 The first college prospectus stated

Occidental’s “purpose will be to realize a culture that is practical and Christian.” 52 Keeping with

this Christian mission, the board of trustees of Occidental was comprised of Presbyterian laymen

and ministers. During its first two decades, the college was joined to an academy where younger

students were educated, but this was discontinued in 1910. 53 The jettisoning of the academy and

49 Ibid. Below are the jobs most in demand from employers for the previous academic year:

Table 12: Most In-Demand Part-Time Positions: USC Undergraduate Students, 1924-25 Academic Year

Men Women

Architect Reader Actor Entertainer Bookkeeper Librarian Busboy Companion Cashier Office Help Carpenter Typist Waiter Waitress Gardener Governess Mail Clerk Switchboard Operator Service Station Secretary Attendant

50 Rolle, Andrew F. Occidental College: The First Seventy-Five Years 1887-1962 . Los Angeles: Occidental College Press, 1962, 6. 51 Ibid., 7. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid., 13. The academy rivaled the college with regard to enrollment size during the late 1880s and 1890s.. During Occidental's first year of operation (1888), the college enrolled 15 students and the academy 31. By 1905, however, 294 students attended Occidental College, and 134 attended the academy.

106 the secularization of the college was intended to transform Occidental into the "Princeton of the

West," a prestigious liberal arts college for the West Coast. 54

As part of this change in mission, Occidental College changed its status from

Presbyterian to nonsectarian in 1910, and its curriculum changed from Christian-influenced to secular as a result. 55 The president of the college in 1910, Jon Willis Baer, took the lead in making such changes in the curriculum, though he was a Presbyterian himself. 56 A history class previously called “The Record of the Unfolding of Divine Providence” became the history of

England and the history of the Middle Ages. 5758 Occidental College was influenced by eastern schools in this transition phase; President Baer's conceptions of the nature of colleges "seemed to derive largely from observation of eastern Ivy League institutions. He had no previous contact with land-grant universities or private coeducational liberal arts colleges.” 59 In the same vein, rhetoric became English composition, mental science became philosophy, and the college instituted a separate academic department for education. 60

As was the case with many local colleges, Occidental moved its site several times, from its original site in the Boyle Heights neighborhood of Los Angeles, to Highland Park, and finally to its present campus in Eagle Rock, always seeking a more advantageous location. The tradeoff always came between campus size and convenience of location. For example, Occidental acquired a larger campus in its Highland Park location than it had in Boyle Heights, but was then far removed from Los Angeles and Pasadena. In the late 1800s, Southern California had a thin

54 Thelin, "California and the Colleges," 151. 55 Rolle, 16. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 However, one historian argues that the institutional change to non-sectarian status had very little real effect: the Board of Trustees was still composed of ministers, the Presbyterian Church still made its regular financial contributions to the college, and students still continued their training as Presbyterian ministers at the college. Cleland, Robert Glass. The History of Occidental College 1887-1937 . Los Angeles: Word Ritchie Press, 1937. 59 Rolle, 16. 60 Ibid.

107 transportation web, with streetcars not yet in use, and automobiles exceedingly rare. Occidental students were not permitted to bring carriages or horses to campus, and so relied on bicycles or walked. The move to Eagle Rock, which turned out to be the final move, was intended to better position the college to draw upon Pasadena (only four miles southwest of campus) for students and financial support, as it was a popular retirement area for wealthy Eastern and Midwestern families. 61

During the 1910s and 1920s, Occidental's leaders pressed forward with ambitious plans; the college launched a million dollar fundraising campaign in 1915, and in 1923, considered purchasing large tracts of property in the Sepulveda Rancho near UCLA's present site in

Westwood. The fundraising campaign failed, in large part because it was based on the presumption that Occidental was the preeminent college in Los Angeles, and ought to be identified and supported by the city as such. As Andrew Rolle explained, "the very premise on which the campaign was built—to project the idea of a municipal college—created a false, indeed untenable image." 62 Alphonzo Bell, Sr., an Occidental graduate (1895) and the creator of Bel-Air Estates, had the idea (before the Janss Company’s Westwood Village/UCLA project) to develop a college campus adjacent to residential neighborhoods he owned. Bell gave

Occidental 1,000 acres, and President Remsen Bird started a $3 million campaign to build a new campus, explaining the scheme as follows:

61 Cleland, History of Occidental , 13. 62 Rolle, 28-29.

108

The enterprise Occidental has undertaken looks to the development of two-first-class, interrelated liberal arts colleges, one for men and one for women. There is at present no men’s college of liberal arts on the Pacific Coast—one, I believe west of the Mississippi—and only one for women, Mills College at Oakland. We have ample room here [at the Eagle Rock campus] for a fully equipped women’s college, but already we are cramped for athletic space with a co-educational college. A group of students want to play baseball. The only diamond we have is occupied by the university. So it is with other intercollegiate athletics. 63

While a 96-acre campus was considered sufficient for women students, according to Bird and Bell, boys needed more room to play. The new campus was dedicated on April 12, 1925, with a picnic held there, the men students inviting the women. 64 In February 1928, Occidental’s executive secretary Arthur Coons, who years later played a central role in the California Master

Plan negotiations, announced that the move would take place by September 1931, but that it depended on selling 800 of the 1,000 acres Bell had given the school. 65 While hopes still lingered in the early 1930s, the plan finally fizzled for lack of funding and fear of competition from

UCLA: “the old grads and students were generally disgusted with Bell’s idea,” explained architectural historian David Gebhard, and “nothing came of it except the name ‘Tigertail Road’ in honor of the Oxy (sic) Tigers.” 66 Further, the Claremont Consortium had already added a women’s liberal arts colleges, Scripps, to its number. After its expansionist misadventures,

Occidental settled into its institutional groove as a coed, selective, non-sectarian liberal arts college.

63 “Occidental to Establish Two Non-Coed Colleges,” Los Angeles Times , July 24, 1924. 64 “Occidental to Dedicate Site,” Los Angeles Times , April 12, 1925. 65 “Occidental to Split Up in 1931,” Los Angeles Times , February 8, 1928. 66 David Gebhard, An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles (Layton, Utah: Gibbs-Smith, 2003), 116.

109

Pomona College and the Development of the Claremont Colleges System

Occidental’s biggest academic and athletic rival in the Los Angeles area for much of its early history was Pomona College. 67 These schools competed for students and on the playing fields, with Pomona, Occidental, USC, Redlands, and Whittier forming an athletic conference in

1894. Congregationalists founded Pomona, which was intended to be a western version of colleges the church had founded back East, such as Dartmouth, Middlebury, and Bowdoin—a

“college of the New England type.”68

The socio-economic development of Los Angeles and population explosion of the city brought ever more people to the pool of potential college students. Pomona’s central mission

“that the intimate personal relations of the small college are of the highest educational value and must be retained inviolate” was threatened by a flood of applicants. 69 In 1919, enrollments exceeded seven hundred, which was Pomona's upper limit of the definition of a “small college.”70 In the fall of 1920, 800 students were enrolled and “200 applicants were turned away for lack of accommodation.” 71 There was pressure in the short term for Pomona to grow its student body, yet in the long term this would have only provoked fruitless competition with USC and UCLA. Pomona wanted badly to stay small, but needed also to find ways to compete and not be crushed by the economies of scale both the new public behemoth UCLA and a large private school such as USC could bring to bear.

67 William W. Clary The Claremont Colleges: A History of the Development of the Claremont Group Plan. Claremont University Center, Claremont, California, 1970, 1. 68 Rudolph, 53. 69 Clary, 1. 70 Ibid. 71 Los Angeles Times , September 26, 1920.

110

The solution to the “crisis” came from the example set by Stanford University. Pomona’s

President Blaisdell in 1923 offered to Miss Ellen Browning Scripps his own views on higher education in the Los Angeles metropolitan area:

I cannot but believe that we shall need here in the South a suburban educational institution of the range of Stanford. My own very deep hope is that instead of one great, undifferentiated university, we might have a group of institutions divided into small colleges – somewhat on the Oxford type – around a library and other utilities that they would use in common. In this way I should hope to preserve the inestimable personal values of the small college while securing the facilities of the great university. Such a development would be a new and wonderful contribution to American education. 72

This must have made an impression on Scripps, as she soon purchased 280 acres of land for a women’s college, meant to be the first of several small colleges under the new Claremont

Consortium. 73 Scripps “believed in women being clear-thinking and high-minded, but beyond these broad guidelines, she left decisions of educational policy up to the board and its officers.” 74

The Committee on Future Organization’s 1925 Statement on the organization of the

Claremont Colleges centered on the concept of the need for small colleges of between 150 and

300 students, a size “such as to establish and maintain and individual esprit de corps . Largely this to be accomplished around a common dining table [which] has been developed historically at Cambridge and Oxford.” 75 The Claremont Colleges were thereby established, including

Pomona College, Scripps College for Women (founded in 1926) and the Claremont Graduate and Research Institution (founded in 1925). 76 This consortium offered a clear alternative to USC and UCLA, which combined undergraduate and graduate studies in one institution and place.

The California Institute of Technology

72 Ibid. 73 Los Angeles Times , February 29, 1924. 74 Helen Lefkowitz Horowitz, “Designing for the Genders: Curriculum and Architecture at Scripps College and the California Institute of Technology,” The Pacific Historical Review, 54 (4) (Nov. 1985), 439-461, 444. 75 Clary, 288. 76 Ibid., 62. These three early institutions were joined in later years by Harvey Mudd College (1955); Pitzer College (1963); and Claremont McKenna College (1946); and The Keck Graduate Institute of Applied Life Sciences, (1997).

111

Caltech is one of the leading research universities in the United States and the world. Its history reveals the many roles colleges played in Los Angeles before the advent of public higher education. First, Caltech did not assume its full name—the California Institute of Technology— until 1920. Until that point, it had been known under various names, including Throop

University, Throop Polytechnic Institute, and Throop College of Technology. Amos Throop, an avid abolitionist prior to the Civil War and civic leader in Chicago afterward (including a stint as city treasurer during and after the Great Fire in 1871) moved to Pasadena in the 1880s. Throop made his fortune in agriculture and real estate speculation, and served as Pasadena's mayor in

1889. As mayor, he sought to establish a college for the town, as Los Angeles already claimed

USC, Pomona, and Occidental, among other institutions. Pasadena, he argued, deserved its own college, which would help boost land values and assist in the training of mechanics and agriculture.

Caltech in its early Throop-named iterations offered practical knowledge and vocational education, with a wide curriculum that bore little resemblance to its later total emphasis on the physical sciences and aeronautics, biology, and mathematics. There was a grammar school on campus in addition to the postsecondary classes in which Amos Throop himself taught many of the classes. Few students could be convinced to attend Throop's school, and soon he was forced to send out recruiters to Santa Barbara, Bakersfield, and Long Beach to find students. 77 These recruiters were paid their travel expenses along with a modest salary and were offered a $75 dollar bonus for each student they were able to enroll. 78 Despite these efforts, the Throop schools were floundering at the turn of the century.

77 Judith R. Goodstein, Millikan's School: A History of the California Institute of Technology (New York: Norton, 1991), 29. 78 Ibid.

112

From 1907 to 1920, George Ellery Hale, one of the school's board of trustees, and the last

President of Throop College, James Scherer, set the institution on a different, more specialized path. The grammar school was jettisoned. 79 Polytechnic High School was also split off in 1910, as the City of Pasadena planned to build a new public high school. 80 Scherer was thrilled at the creation of the Throop Polytechnic Institute, which began operations in the fall 1910 semester with 34 students, explaining:

This week will be one of the happiest in my life. I have been working toward this end every minute since I became connected with Throop and I now know we have the making of one of the very best technological schools anywhere. And being located in southern California with the very best of climatic conditions and so far away from any other polytechnic institution of its class, I believe that within a very few years Throop will be second to none not only in the class of its graduates but in point of numbers. 81

In 1911, the California State Legislature considered a bill that would have established a state “institute of technology” in Los Angeles. 82 Throop President James Scherer had never supported the expansion of the University of California to the southern part of the state, and was terrified at the prospect of state competition in technical education in southern California. 83

Accordingly, he and Throop’s Board of Trustees swiftly offered to give the state the Throop

Polytechnic Institute, which would be the core of a new state institute of technology in Pasadena, and a new bill followed that would make Throop a state school. 84 Though Stanford President

David Starr Jordan was first in favor, he ended up withdrawing his vital support because of the

University of California's arguments against this plan—Berkeley’s leaders still being fearful of competition from a new southern branch. 85 Without Jordan’s help, the bill was set aside.

79 Polytechnic Elementary School simultaneously opened in 1907 in a new location; the school added a 9 th grade in 1918, and became a full high school in 1959. 80 Goodstein, Millikan's School , 30. 81 “New Era for Throop Dawns,” Los Angeles Times , June 6, 1910, pg. 116. 82 Goodstein, Millikan’s School , 31. 83 Ibid. 84 Ibid. 85 Ibid.

113

Following the state's rebuff, Hale, with Scherer's concurrence, assembled a team of scientists such as chemistry professor Arthur Noyes, the former president of MIT, and physicist Robert

Millikan. These scientists spent World War I in Washington, D.C. working on the war effort, but also crafting plans for Caltech's institutional direction.

Caltech and the First World War

Throop’s little college exploded into a prestigious technical powerhouse during the First

World War. According to historian Judith Goodstein, “to Hale, World War I was the best thing that could have happened to Throop. [Hale] lobbied not only for science to play a role in national affairs but also for Throop to play a larger role in American science. In fact, Hale used the war shamelessly to promote the transformation of Throop College of Technology into the

California Institute of Technology.” 86 In 1916, the year before the United States entered the war,

Throop made military training for its students part of the required curriculum, responding to a petition from the (all-male) student body signed by eighty percent of the students who wanted the formerly voluntary training to be made mandatory. 87 President Scherer had already called for a “new birth of patriotism,” that year, and gladly signed their petition; Goodstein argues he was

“already dreaming of turning the twenty-two acre campus into one huge training camp.” 88

Throop was the only private college or university in the country to implement this kind of program without financial assistance from the federal government.

The student body swelled thanks to Throop’s volunteering to act as a training college for the Student Army Training Corps (“SATC”). 89 While Throop ordinarily enrolled about 200

86 Jonathan Kirsch, “Caltech’s Story and the Science Business,” Los Angeles Times , October 16, 1991 pg. E4. 87 “Throop Military Training Required,” Los Angeles Times , May 16, 1916. 88 Goodstein, 33. 89 “War Department May Restore S.A.T.C.," Los Angeles Times , January 7, 1919, I6. The University of Southern California, Throop, Pomona College, the Los Angeles State Normal School, and Occidental College all created SATC units during the First World War.

114 students, toward the end of the First World War, Throop added another 100 students to train as soldiers and engineers in the U.S. Army, with the federal government paying for their tuition, room and board. (A previous training camp planned immediately following President Wilson’s

April 1917 declaration of war had to be cancelled by the War Department as it simply was not prepared to supply the 1,500 volunteer recruits).90 As with other colleges hosting SATC units, the federal government constructed barracks and a mess hall on campus, and appointed a military commandant for Throop’s unit, Capt. Charles Leeds, U.S. Army Engineers. All of these arrangements came so late in the war that Throop’s SATC unit barely had time to try on their newly issued uniforms before the guns fell silent across the Western Front on November 11,

1918. Throop’s President Scherer had been prescient in his remarks to the SATC unit on October

1, 1918, speaking of the war effort: “Our boys over there…have got the Huns on the run. They are fighting as though the war were to be over by Christmas.” 91 And so it was; in fact, it was over by Thanksgiving. Scherer was only getting warmed up though, declaiming to the assembled student soldiers:

we here must prepare as though [the war] were to last twenty years…150,000 new men are standing as you are standing at this moment on the campuses of American colleges and universities pledging allegiance to America and undertaking, particularly in the technical schools, to provide Uncle Sam’s army precisely those trained soldiers of which he tells the army is most in need. It is a great day for America. It is a great day for you. 92

After the war, there was some lingering enthusiasm for continued participation in the new

Reserve Officers Training Corps, which had emerged from the SATC program, especially

90 “Throop Camp is Abandoned,” Los Angeles Times , May 11, 1917, 111. 91 “Technical Men Attend Throop,” Los Angeles Times , October 6, 1918. This article also ominously (with the benefit of historical hindsight, ominously) that “no cases of Spanish influenza have been reported in Pasadena. However, Dr. Stanley Black, City Health Officer, today issued orders to all persons hearing of possible cases here to report at once to the city health office.” The 1918 influenza pandemic spread more quickly than perhaps it might be otherwise because of the housing of SATC units in cramped military barracks. On November 1, 1918, the Los Angeles Times reported that “Army training at Throop has gone steadily on during the influenza quarantine,” as the pandemic had progressed rapidly in only a few weeks and the campus had been quarantined from the local area. It was a military camp under lockdown, no longer merely a college campus. 92 Ibid.

115 because Throop hosted one of the very few engineer units. Following the change in the school’s name and in its leadership in the early 1920s, however, this enthusiasm dissipated, and Caltech begged out of the ROTC program, explaining in a letter to the War Department that “the amount of strictly military training which can be gained by a student in a two hours’ weekly drill throughout a period of two years could be more than equalled ( sic) in a period of emergency by a very few weeks of military training in a training camp.” 93

Caltech was unique among colleges and universities in Southern California during the

1920s and 1930s in that it only recruited students interested in mathematics and the physical sciences. By 1930, it also limited admissions to 160 new students per year, keeping its total enrollments around 500. 94 Not surprisingly, a shared attribute among many incoming Caltech freshmen was a love of science, especially if they had graduated from a high school with a robust science curriculum, laboratories, and supportive teachers. For example, Carl Anderson (who lived on the border between the Los Angeles and Glendale school districts) ended up attending

Los Angeles Polytechnic High School (1923-1927) rather than Glendale Union High School.

When asked years later if Polytechnic had supplied him with a better education than Glendale,

Anderson answered,

I don’t know because I never went to Glendale. I was very happy with it, and I was not critical. I didn't try to ask myself whether I was getting a good education or not. I just went to high school. I was interested in electrical engineering, and we had a good laboratory of electrical machinery—motors and generators and alternators and transformers. So I studied quite a bit of electrical, technical things. 95

Anderson explained that there was a strong peer influence in his decision to attend Caltech; he and three friends all chose to attend Caltech together, received their bachelor's degrees in science

93 “Caltech to Discontinue Training Unit,” Los Angeles Times , June 9, 1920, II6. 94 “Los Angeles Times , September 7, 1930. 95 Carl Anderson, Interview with Carl Anderson. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California, 1981.

116 the same day, and later received their PhD's on the same day in 1930.96 Anderson shortly thereafter discovered the positron (1932), and in recognition of this achievement was awarded the Nobel Prize for Physics in 1936. 97

Caltech promoted its campus through frequent open house days, which enticed local talented students to consider attending. John D. Roberts, later a famed chemistry professor at

Caltech, had wanted to go to Caltech for college, but ended up attending UCLA in 1937 because it was cheaper, going on to receive a PhD in 1944. Yet he recalled the strong draw of Caltech:

“Einstein was here [Caltech.] He was very popular then. I don’t think people realized how much there was in the popular press about Einstein and relativity. At the same time, Caltech was putting on open houses. Whenever Caltech had an open house, I would get my aunt, a schoolteacher, to drive over and visit her friends in Pasadena, and just let me off and let me stay during the day,” as on these days the entire campus was open to the general public, and not just to prospective students. 98 Willie Fowler, a physicist and astrophysicist who won the 1983 Nobel

Prize in Physics, recalled that the first thing he saw on arriving at Caltech in 1931 as a new graduate student was Albert Einstein arguing with Robert Millikan on the steps of Throop Hall.

Fowler decided then that “this was the place for me.” 99 Caltech did not look at the University of

California or other local private colleges as peers and real competitors. For example, when building new dormitory halls in the early 1930s, Caltech sent students to scout out the Ivy

League schools, Northwestern, Williams College, University of Toronto, Massachusetts Institute

96 Ibid. 97 William H. Pickering, Carl David Anderson: A Biographical Memoir , 1998, http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/anderson-carl-d.pdf . 98 John D. Roberts, Interview with John D. Roberts. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives, Pasadena, California, 1985. 99 David Goodstein, “It’s Been Cosmic from the Start,” Los Angeles Times , January 2, 1991, pg. OCB11.

117 of Technology, Haverford, Swarthmore, Lafayette, Duke, the military academies at West Point and Annapolis, Oxford, and Cambridge. 100

Redlands University

Following the lead of Methodists and Catholics in establishing colleges in southern

California, various Baptist churches combined forces to establish Redlands University in

Redlands, California. 101 Redlands’ founders rejected a plan to blend with Congregationalists at

Pomona College in favor of having their own Baptist institution and in order to ambitiously pursue medical and other professional schools. Karl Wells, a wealthy local Baptist banker, gave

40 acres of land and $25,000 to help establish the new school, which was located roughly 70 miles east of Los Angeles and 30 miles east of Pomona in San Bernardino County. 102 Redlands opened in the fall semester of 1909, with nine professors and 59 students, three of whom graduated the following spring. 103

La Verne College

Another local Southern California Christian sect, the Church of the Brethren, known in the late 1800s as “German Baptists,” bought for $75,000 an old hotel and its immediate surrounding area left over from the 1880s real estate bust, and opened La Verne College in 1895.

While it was the church’s inspiration to build the college, the school itself was nonsectarian, established 30 miles east of Los Angeles so that students would be “free from evil surroundings,” in a town then known as Lordsburg (the name would be changed to La Verne in 1916). 104

Lordsburg prospered as a center of the burgeoning California citrus industry, and as a stop on the

Pacific Electric Railways connected to Los Angeles on the old Red Cars. After closing for a few

100 “Caltech Students Decide Own Housing Problems,” Los Angeles Times , March 8, 1931. 101 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_University_of_Redlands . 102 Hill, Six Collegiate Decades , 95. 103 http://www.redlands.edu/about-redlands/289.aspx#.VPHjBPnF9yU . 104 Hill , 65-66.

118 years, the college reopened in 1903, with all of the faculty and students living and attending classes in this former hotel, churning their own butter, growing their own food, milking their own cows, canning fruit.105 It has survived to the present as LaVerne University, with nine campus locations, a law school, and other graduate departments. 106

105 Hill, 65. 106 http://laverne.edu/about/history/ .

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PART II

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Chapter 5: Significance of Summer Session in the Historical Development of the State Normal School of Los Angeles and its Transition to Full University of California Campus

The objective of this chapter is to demonstrate the historical significance of summer sessions to the historical development of the State Normal School of Los Angeles and its transition to a branch of the University of California. The chapter covers the late nineteenth century through the 1940s, a fifty year period spanning the advent of summer sessions at many

American colleges and universities, including the State Normal School of Los Angeles, up to

America's entry into World War II. Summer sessions are receiving special attention in this dissertation because in 1916 University of California Regent Edward A. Dickson used the plan for a new Los Angeles-based University of California Summer Session to lay the political groundwork and infrastructure for a new University of California campus in southern California.

Beyond UCLA’s example, summer sessions proved popular on other Pacific Coast university campuses for their ability to serve unique curricular needs, such as teacher and librarian training and later for their success in luring prominent East Coast professors and thinkers westward for the summer. The summer sun cast a warm and flattering light on these relatively new campuses, and helped to build their national reputations.

With the exception of Watson Dickerman’s 1948 unpublished dissertation, the history of summer sessions at American colleges and universities was not given much scholarly attention until Clarence Schoenfeld and Donald Zillman of the University of Wisconsin published The

American University in Summer in 1967. 1 Schoenfeld and Zillman observed the tremendous progress in the summertime, observing that an entirely new branch of higher education had flowered within the span of one life: seventy years. Laurence Veysey pointed out the power of

1 Watson Dickerman, The Historical Development of the Summer Session in Higher Institutions in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948); Clarence Schoenfeld and Donald Zillman , The American University in Summer (Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1967).

121 summer school's novelty in the late 1890s: "when William R. Harper created the University of

Chicago in 1892, he believed that his model was genuinely and excitingly 'new'—because in fact it…called for courses to be taught in the summertime." 2 Frederick Rudolph tied the new summer classes to "the enlargement of university purpose,” similar to the expansion of university extension departments. 3 Henry S. Townsend, the Inspector General of Schools for the Territory of Hawai'i in the 1890s, observed that "three important lines of education are peculiar to the end of the nineteenth century, i.e. the Chautauqua system, university extension, and summer schools.

And of these the latter has the important advantage of teaching the teachers and arousing their enthusiasm." 4

Several major strengths guaranteed the success of summer sessions in American colleges and universities. First was the convenience and availability of vital courses to students who either needed to catch up from a poor year or who wanted to leap ahead, possibly to an early graduation. Second was the chance for professors to experiment with the curriculum and with teaching methods without having to force changes through the rusty gears of the regular school year’s bureaucratic machinery. Third, in summer the campus—and the classroom—could be flung open to a broader public and the institution's work could be made more relevant in a local context, such as with University of California fieldtrips to Yosemite for photography classes.

This is not to say colleges and universities back East did not also market themselves to their regions in summer; they did, as reported by a New York Times reporter in 1937:

Nowadays, no matter what the subject, the classroom does not…confine the Summer student. Witness, for example, the session in housing community planning and low rental management of New York University which makes a round of slums and model housing developments; the applied science courses at Teachers College, Columbia, which demonstrate the application of scientific principles in the development of a great city by

2 Laurence Veysey, The Emergence of the American University (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 340. 3 Rudolph, 344. 4 Hawaiian Gazette , August 7, 1896.

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sailing on the Hudson, visiting the Palisades, the Empire State Building, the Holland Tunnel. The world in which he lives is of primary concern to the Summer student, and he is indefatigable in field trips to factories, hospitals and sewage disposal plants, as well as museums, historic sites, libraries, botanical gardens, and the zoos. 5

However, UCLA did not market its idyllic summer as full of opportunities to visit slums or factories; no, not when tours of movie studios were available to be trumpeted.

There have been two major criticisms of summer sessions since their inception. The first major criticism was that these classes were insufficiently rigorous and too time-compressed to offer great educational value. In 1927, University of Wisconsin President Glenn Frank declared

"six weeks was too short a time in which to produce anything of educational value.” 6 The other major criticism was that studying in summer left both students and professors burnt out. As

Jacques Barzun complained, "learning all year is as bad as teaching all year, to say nothing of the needs of students who count on a free summer to earn money. The learning mind needs intervals of assimilation and in study time, surroundings more calm, not less, than they are right now." 7

Regardless of these critiques, summer courses and programs at American universities and colleges blossomed in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Guest professors flocked west, ideas were diffused from coast to coast, and normal schools like the Los Angeles State

Normal School could show they were ready to become full universities.

Historical Development of Summer Sessions

The U.S. Office of Education reported in 1893 that 47 colleges and universities offered some sort of summer coursework, though rarely for credit and mainly geared toward continuing education for teachers and scientists. However, by 1911, 53 universities held summer sessions,

5 Catherine MacKenzie, "City Draws 33,000 for Summer Study,” New York Times , July 4, 1937. 6 Howard Martin, “Summer at North American Universities and Colleges: Impacts and Influences,” Summer Academe 4 (2003), 32. 7 Jacques Barzun, The American University: How it Runs, Where It’s Going (New York: Harper & Row, 1968), 189.

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along with 87 colleges and 83 normal schools. 8 If not central to a major university's mission, summer sessions were nonetheless important auxiliary pieces, and as seen in Table 13 below, grew in popularity prior to the First World War.

Table 13: Enrollments of Representative Colleges and Universities for Selected Years in Early Growth of Summer Sessions 9

Name of Institution 1911 1915 1916*

Men Women Men Women Men Women

U. Cal (Berkeley) 625 1,325 1,800 3,500 1,190 2,785 University of Chicago 1,710 1,538 2,182 2,187 2,531 2,893 University of Colorado 83 167 176 522 175 655 Columbia University 1,296 1,677 2,409 3,552 2,847 5,175 Dartmouth College 93 44 95 174 113 248 University of Georgia 90 280 233 705 270 790 Harvard University ** ** ** ** 495 549 University of Kansas 206 223 288 290 394 422 Mass. Inst. of Tech. 279 0 436 5 543 3 Univ. of Michigan 943 251 1,366 295 1,480 333 U. of North Carolina 71 154 206 525 283 767 University of Oregon 53 93 107 76 129 185 Univ. of Pennsylvania 344 338 568 467 494 551 Univ. of So. California 78 79 168 250 242 437 U. of Texas (Austin) 350 384 482 376 548 929 University of Vermont 21 34 52 145 50 309 Univ. of Washington 120 253 343 721 368 1,018 Univ. of Wisconsin 1,031 522 1,498 1,276 1,549 1,568

*1916 was the last year of peace prior to the United States’ entry into the First World War in April 1917. **Data not reported.

The summer curriculum in the normal schools was largely confined to teacher training in elementary or high school level courses. For example, in 1911, the Washington State Normal

School in Bellingham summer term offered Psychology, philosophy of education, rural school methods, drawing, manual training, cooking, sewing, algebra, geometry, physics, physiology,

English history, expression, and literature. These Normal School summer sessions briefly

8 United States Department of the Interior, U.S. Office of Education Commissioners' Report . Washington: Government Printing Office, 1912. 9 United States Department of the Interior. (1917, 1916, 1911). Reports of the Commissioner of Education for the Years Ended June 30, 1911, 1916, and 1917. Washington: Government Printing Office.

124 blossomed around the end of the First World War, as set forth in Table 14. However—as in

UCLA’s case—they were merged into more comprehensive programs offered at universities.

Table 14: Number of Summer Schools and Summer Sessions 10

Type of Summer School 1892 1895 1911 1915 1918 1929 1939

Universities and colleges 11 94 140 125 323 414 594 Teachers’ colleges 0 0 0 0 0 130 150 Normal schools 0 0 83 94 135 63 39 Other types of summer 103 235 254 515 132 0 0 schools, including Chautauqua assemblies, proprietary summer schools, etc. Total number of summer 114 319 477 734 480 607 783 schools reporting

In their own summer sessions, universities offered a scaled back version of their full academic year catalogs. From East to West, there was little geographic variation in the breadth of the universities’ summer offerings; however, for the most part, the larger and more prestigious a university was, the more expansive in scale was its summer catalog. However, even after only a few years of operation, it was clear that the main colleges offering a summer session shared a similar catalog of courses. By the 1890s, for example, most offered botany, chemistry, English,

French, German, History, Latin, Mathematics, and Physics, with several also offering

Astronomy, Biology, Philosophy, and Psychology. 11 As discussed below, UCLA, while showing some variation due to its normal school roots, quickly adapted its summer catalog to those offered by large public universities and elite private colleges.

Pacific Coast Colleges and Universities

10 Dickerman, 2. 11 Ibid. The fifteen institutions analyzed by Dickerman were Amherst College, Colorado College, Cornell University, the University of Georgia, Harvard University, the University of Illinois, Indian University, University of Iowa, University of Michigan, University of Minnesota, University of Missouri, University of Nebraska, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, and University of Wisconsin.

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Other colleges and universities on the Pacific Coast had different institutional experiences with summer sessions during this period, and the successes, failures, even the existence of these programs depended on the personal views of institutional leaders. The

University of Oregon launched a session in the summer of 1895, when several professors taught classes at Gerhard Park near Seaside, Oregon, yet the program folded after a few years for lack of funding. 12 Dismayed by this early failure, the University of Oregon's Board of Regents refused to hazard another attempt until outside influences were brought to bear in the person of

Miss Cornelia Marvin, the Secretary of the Oregon State Library. 13 Marvin sought locations where public librarians could be trained, and the Eugene campus in the glorious Oregon summer seemed perfect. The popularity and success of this pilot librarian training program led to greater demand for summer courses, until a new program was launched in Portland in 1916, and enrollment topped one thousand students (1,036) the following year. 14

The University of California’s Berkeley campus set the tone for its subsequently established branch campuses when it launched its official six week-long summer session in 1900

(Berkeley had been holding an informal hodgepodge of summer courses through various academic departments throughout the 1890s.) The Regents of the University of California set forth guidelines for the new summer session that were followed in later years by its new campuses:

…the quality of instruction shall be equivalent to that offered in regular session; courses offered shall be those requested by and most profitable to students; instructors are to be compensated but, inasmuch as the funds of the University are not equal to an additional outlay for the expense of Summer Sessions, a suitable tuition fee, regardless of the numbers of courses taken, shall be charged to make the sessions self-supporting. 15

12 Henry D. Sheldon, The History of the University of Oregon (Portland, Oregon: Binfords & Mort, 1940), 180. 13 Ibid. 14 Ibid. 15 The Centennial Record of the University of California, Verne A. Stadtman, ed., Berkeley, CA: University of California Printing Department, 1967, 113.

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The initial tuition fee at Berkeley was set at ten dollars, and "ten academic departments— philosophy, pedagogy, history and political science, Greek, Latin, English, mathematics, physics, chemistry, and botany—offered 37 courses with a total enrollment of 433." 16 Berkeley's commitment to academic rigor in the summer helped to cultivate and grow these sessions, with increasing numbers of courses offered by more departments. In 1920, another summer session was added due to great student interest, which came on top of the session already operating at the

Los Angeles campus. 17 Yet there was still a stubborn tendency to treat the summer as an academic smorgasbord stuffed with the leftovers from the year's catalog, the enthusiasms of eccentric faculty, and reflexive reactions to trends. For example, when in May 1909 a rash of marriage engagements broke out among Berkeley students, the faculty quickly added a course on household economics to the summer catalog, and a discussion between professors and students on the "desirability" of co-education was reported as becoming "animated." 18

The University of California's branch campuses hosted summer classes long before they were independent entities. From 1924 to 1932, citrus agriculture-related courses were offered at the University of California's Citrus Experimental Station in Riverside, a seed which grew later into a full University campus. In these early Riverside summer sessions, "courses covered the entire field of subtropical fruit culture in the United States,” with students from the Union's citrus states and foreign countries attending. 19 The University of California's School of Agriculture in

Davis, which became a full campus in 1959, had no formal Summer Session until 1946, yet there

16 Ibid. 17 Ibid. 18 "Ten Co-eds Engaged,” New York Times , May 7, 1909. Apparently a few years earlier, there had been a host of secret marriages among Berkeley's students, enough to provoke President Benjamin Ide Wheeler to address the issue in a speech to Berkeley's women students, "advising them against encouraging marriage until the men students had become wage earners." 19 Centennial Record , 449.

127 are records of students pursuing their studies in summers beginning in 1929. 20 The Santa

Barbara College of the University of California began summer classes in 1945, with veterans returning from the Second World War swelling initial enrollments from 573 in 1945 to 1,986 in

1947. 21 Santa Barbara's summer sessions curriculum resembled UCLA, not surprising as both had followed a Normal School to University of California campus path. 22 Education, physical education, and crafts dominated the course catalog from 1945 to 1958, with "offerings in the humanities, the physical sciences, mathematics, and the social sciences accounting for only 47 percent of the curriculum." 23 In San Francisco in the early 1900s, nurses began training in the summertime at the University of California Hospital, beginning as a response to a desperate call for trained personnel in the aftermath of the horrific 1906 earthquake and fire. 24

Stanford University was the earliest private institution on the West Coast to attempt a summer session, operating one in the mid-1890s.25 Instructors were paid entirely from tuition fees, with no further university support provided. Mrs. Leland Stanford, the great benefactor of the university, was always cool to the idea of classes in the summer heat, and finally abolished it in 1899, ordering that an "amendment to the Founding Grant, dated May 31, 1899, provided that no summer school should be established or mentioned at the University or have the use of the

20 Ibid., 186. Previously known as the University Farm when it was created in 1906, this campus in Yolo County focused primarily on dairy production and research in these early decades. 21 Ibid., 500. Santa Barbara was previously a State Normal School like UCLA, and was planned to be a small liberal arts college operated by the University of California but was made into a full University campus in 1958. 22 Santa Barbara admittedly had a short interlude as a State College campus (predecessor to the California State University) before being taken over by the University of California. 23 Ibid., 501. 24 Ibid., 461. The University Hospital's training school for nurses was replaced in 1939 with a School of Nursing. 25 O.W. Elliott, Stanford University: the First Twenty-Five Years. Palo Alto, California: Stanford University Press, 1937.

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University name." 26 She relented only a few years later, suggesting that a summer school be created "with courses mainly or entirely given by distinguished men from the East." 27

At Occidental College, a summer session was attempted for a few years in the 1920s, but it was shut down because the administration sought to discourage all non-standard university course offerings and because enrollments (and therefore tuition fees) were not high enough to justify paying for the session. 28 This theme of financial distress is also seen in the history of the summer session at USC. USC offered its first summer session in 1906 to meet the local credentialing needs of schoolteachers; the university was so strapped for cash however, that faculty members volunteered to operate it themselves with the tuition receipts. 29 From 1906 to

1911, volunteer USC professors set their own tuition rates for their own classes. At the end of the summer, "salaries and expenses were prorated among faculty members according to his number of students and their use of school facilities." 30 There was no Dean of the Summer

Session, only the professors, a registrar, secretary, a few librarians, and a custodian. By 1911,

157 students had enrolled and the program was solidly profitable, and then the university administration took control of this summer chicken laying little golden tuition eggs. 31 USC's summer program drew admiration even from its rivals, and in 1916 the University of California agreed to an " entente cordiale " with USC in which there was an exchange of professors for the

1917 summer term.32

26 Ibid., 123. 27 Ibid., 124. 28 Andrew F. Rolle, Occidental College: The First Seventy-Five Years, 1887-1962 , Los Angeles: Occidental College Press, 1962. 29 Servin and Wilson, 68. 30 Ibid., 69. 31 Ibid., 70. 32 Los Angeles Times , September 24, 1916.

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Southern Branch of the University of California (UCLA)

Summer sessions brought powerful and lasting changes to universities on the West Coast, but perhaps nowhere was the impact greater than in Los Angeles. A University of California

Summer Session, begun in 1916 on the campus of Los Angeles High School, was the main device allowing for the creation of UCLA in 1919 (originally known as the Southern Branch of the University of California). The University of California had operated summer courses on its

Berkeley campus since 1890, when teachers were invited there to take credential courses in chemistry, physics, mathematics and education. 33 President Benjamin Wheeler promoted the idea of summer sessions by expanding course offerings in 1900 to eleven departments, which boosted enrollment from 161 students in 1899 to 433 the following year. 34 The tuition fee for the

1900 summer term was ten dollars. 35 Over the next decade, schoolteachers from around the state began to trek to Berkeley in the summers to take credential courses. In 1916, the Teachers'

Association of Southern California requested through Regent Edward Dickson, the only

University of California Regent from southern California at the time, that a separate summer session be set up for the southern part of the state. 36

This summer session idea closely followed an attempt in the California Legislature the previous year to open a new state university in southern California with a separate Board of

Regents. 37 Dickson had advised President Wheeler then that the Regents must lead and not follow public opinion on the issue, but Wheeler wanted to slow down and take it "one step at a time." 38 A University summer session in Los Angeles was a big step toward a new campus. The

33 Stadtman, The History of the University of California, 1868-1968 , 217. 34 Ibid., 218. 35 "Summer Session--UCLA." University of California Digital Archives. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~ucalhist/general_history/campuses/ucla/summer.html . 36 Dickson, 6. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid.

130 superintendent of Los Angeles city schools made the connection clear, declaring "the [summer session] proposition means but one thing to me and that is, the ultimate establishment of a State university or permanent branch thereof in Los Angeles. It is a decidedly significant step in the right direction, and nobody realized that fact more than President Wheeler." 39

In 1918, the first summer session at the Southern Branch of the University of California offered a curriculum shaped largely by the needs of the nation's war effort in the First World

War. Therefore, classes such as elementary cooking were accompanied by courses on Military

German (Language), Automobile Construction, History of Germany and Prussia, French

Civilization, and Military Sketching. 40 The first summer session in Los Angeles was popular, enrolling 630 students, and over the next decade grew more popular until in 1932, the first summer classes were held on the Westwood campus for the first time, and 2,600 students attended. 41 Between 1918 and 1930, enrollments at the UCLA Summer session had increased

400 percent. 42 Competition was fierce between the University of California and its southern branch—as a Los Angeles daily boasted in 1920: "The wonderful growth of the summer session in southern California is further evidenced by the fact that in its eleventh year the summer session at Berkeley had an attendance of 1,051, a registration that southern California already greatly outnumbers in this, its third year." 43 In the early years of the summer session at Los

Angeles, schoolteachers comprised the bulk of the students enrolled; for example, in 1921, there were 1,270 schoolteachers enrolled out of a total of 1,843 students. 44

39 Los Angeles Times , November 2, 1917. 40 UCLA Alumni Association, California of the Southland: A History of the University of California at Los Angeles , Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Alumni Association, 1937. 41 "Summer Session--UCLA." University of California Digital Archives. http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/~ucalhist/general_history/campuses/ucla/summer.html 42 New York Times , July 6, 1930. 43 Los Angeles Times , June 22, 1920. 44 Los Angeles Times , August 7, 1921. These teachers were accompanied by 124 students from "miscellaneous occupations,” including "twenty-three nurses, seventeen housewives, six businessmen, four stenographers, three

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While the main purpose of the Southern Branch's Summer Session was to assist schoolteachers, principals, and administrators, it embraced the needs of the larger community too. Graduate students could advance their studies in smaller classes with greater individual attention from faculty members. 45 Undergraduate students, especially those from southern

California who could not afford a summer up in Berkeley, would be able to either accelerate their progress toward a degree, or play catch-up, making up ground if they were struggling in their coursework during the regular academic year. High school graduates about to enter college or who needed remedial courses to qualify for admission, were welcome. Finally, a general invitation to the community was made, specifically to "housewives, graduate nurses, social workers, Americanization workers, students of public health, and all adults who are qualified to pursue with profit any course given, whether or not they are engaged in teaching or study." 46

This call was answered, according to a description of the first day of registration for the 1927 summer term:

At the conclusion of the first day's registration Saturday, a total of 2,300 [students] had enrolled for the various courses offered. The great majority of them were women and a good percentage of them housewives. They also included artists, writers, artisans, mechanics, bankers, businessmen and women, butchers, bell boys and restaurant employees. A random inquiry disclosed that most of these were intent of supplementing the education they had received in their earlier years or simply desirous of broadening their knowledge on some subject which interested them. It revealed also that the fame of California's climate and her educational institutions had reached to all corners of the earth. Representatives of nearly all European countries and many from the Orient were found to have enrolled in addition to large groups from the virtually every state in the Union. They had changed the usual business and pleasure trip to one of education and pleasure in Southern California. 47 social service workers, three mechanics, three librarians, three dressmakers, three clerks, two accountants, one writer, one wood maker, one mine manager, one milliner, one lumberman, two journalists, one lecturer, one forge worker, one foreign trade executive, one etcher, one clergyman, one Christian Science practitioner, and one advertiser." 45 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5 (1921): 6. At this time, however, only the School of Education offered graduate courses during the Summer Session. 46 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5 (1921): 6. This particular invitational language was dropped from the Catalog in 1924. 47 Los Angeles Times , June 27, 1927.

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The Summer Session was self-supporting from the start, with a $20 tuition fee and laboratory fees of up to $12.50 for certain classes. Room and board were estimated to cost from

$50 to $90 for the six week session, and textbooks cost from $5 to $15. 48 Even these modest costs, however, could scare off students who expected and needed to earn money during the summer to pay for their college costs for the upcoming year.

Although the Southern Branch had only recently been a normal school, Summer Session curricular offerings closely matched the University of California's wide-ranging fare, and

University of California credit was awarded for successful completion of summer classes in the courses set forth in Table 15:

Table 15: University of California Southern Branch Departments Offering Courses in 1921 Summer Session 49

Agriculture 50 Household Arts & Science Astronomy Journalism Chemistry Latin Civil Engineering Law 51 Electrical Engineering Mathematics Criminology Mechanical Engineering Economics Music Education Physical Education English Physics French 52 Political Science Geography Public Health Graphic Art Public Speaking History Spanish

Pressure grew at the Southern Branch and at Summer Session programs across the nation to use the summer to expand course offerings, to experiment with the curriculum. The fast-paced

48 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5 (1921): 8. 49 Ibid. In 1922, Drawing and Art, Philosophy, and Psychology were added to the course offerings. 50 All agriculture-related classes were held in the summer of 1921 in Chaffey Junior College. 51 Only one law class, Commercial Law, was given in the 1921 Summer Session. 52 Courses in German and Italian were added in 1925.

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Roaring Twenties threatened to leave old-fashioned thinking behind: as Willis Sutton, President of the National Educational Association warned, "the teacher of tomorrow must make at least seven blades of educational grass grow where but one flourished before," and new media like radio and motion pictures could help with this effort.53 Summer sessions offered opportunities to escape the constrains of the standard course catalog, and in 1931 UCLA's Summer Session led the way with "the first systematic [course] ever given in the methods of application of talking motion pictures to various subjects of the curriculum from civics and biology to surgery and music." 54 As the reporter explained, "the pedagogue, formerly skilled in illustrating his theme by lantern slides and pictures in books, has been instructed in the technique of enlivening it by these sources of more powerful and…more rapid and lasting sense impressions." 55

UCLA marketed its Summer Session as a wonderful opportunity to visit Los Angeles and sunny southern California during its season of warm days and cool nights (not a small point in these pre-air conditioning years). As remarked on in the 1921 Summer Session catalog, "the attractions of the beautiful sea-coast and the mountain country, all easily accessible from the city, are well known." 56 Like a glossy realtor's flyer, the catalog continues at length:

The climate of Los Angeles is the result of the combination of three factors: the southern location of the city, its nearness to the ocean, and the presence of the mountain range on the north. Its southern location causes moderately high summer temperatures. These, however, owing to the protection afforded by the mountains, never reach the extremes found in the interior beyond the range. The highest temperature for June, July, and August average about 70˚, 75˚, and 81˚, respectively, and not infrequently the thermometer in the warmest part of the day may reach 90˚ and 95˚. Owing to the prevailing summer wind from the ocean, the humidity is usually fairly high. The nights, on the other hand, are usually cool. During the summer months morning fogs are frequent, but are almost always dissipated early in the forenoon. Contrasting with these effects of the ocean influence, occasional north winds bring air of high temperature over the city, but the dryness of the air keeps it from being oppressive or debilitating.

53 Eunice Barnard, "In the Classroom and on the Campus,” New York Times , July 26, 1931. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5(1921): 15.

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Altogether the summer climate of Los Angeles, though warmer than that of many places farther up the coast, nevertheless is not without the charm of a moderate changeability coupled with a large amount of bright, sunny weather, and with an absence of rainfall, which makes possible many out-door activities without interruption by the weather. 57

UCLA's highlighting the cool summer nights—countering Easterners' fears of scorching summer heat—matched tactics used by Los Angeles booster organizations such as the All Year Club, which "aimed at overcoming the perception of southern California as merely a winter vacationland." 58

The 1921 Summer Session Catalog also includes a full section entirely on "Excursions,” which as with the section on the area's climate, was repeated with little alteration for years:

The neighborhood of Los Angeles offers unusual opportunities for combining recreation with serious study. Bathing facilities are afforded by the beaches which dot the neighboring coast line; a network of automobile drives covers all southern California; week-end excursions are possible to the old missions of California, to Mt. Lowe and to Mt. Wilson with their observatories, to Catalina Island with its submarine gardens and its fishing, to Santa Barbara and Riverside, to Pasadena and San Diego, to Bear Lake and other mountain resorts, to La Jolla Biological Station, to the moving picture plants, and the famous La Brea fields. 59

The following year, the Summer Session students "in a body" took a few "hikes and excursions" together, including a group visit to one of the film studios. 60 Coincidentally, Regent Dickson's

All Year Club created a movie studio tour for visiting tourist groups and a "premiere night" or

"first night" of a film was high on the list of attractions offered to visitors. 61 In an era when colleges and universities took a more hands-on approach to students' social lives, the Summer

Session at the Southern Branch offered cultural events, mixers, and dances in the Women's

Gymnasium, supervised by the watchful Dean of Women McLaughlin. 62 Finally, beginning in

57 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5 (1921), 15. 58 Todd Gish, “Growing and Selling Los Angeles: The All -Year Club of Southern California, 1921-1941,” Southern California Quarterly 89, (2007), 391-415, 401. (Regent Dickson was a prominent member of the All Year Club. 59 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5 (1921), 14. 60 University of California Bulletin 15, no. 5 (1922), 16. 61 Gish, 408. 62 University of California Bulletin 17, no. 8 (1924), 27.

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1921, and lasting through the 1920s, the entire Summer Session student body met every Monday for special lectures. 63

UCLA’s Summer Session succeeded by following the course laid out by other summer sessions, and by being marketed in exactly the same way as any summer vacation to Los Angeles would be. In the history of the Summer Session, we see higher education, entertainment, and tourism all bound together, and can observe how summer success led to a fresh start for the

Southern Branch.

63 University of California Bulletin 14, no. 5 (1921): 13.

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Chapter 6: The Flu and the SATC

Waldermar Westergaard, who came to teach at UCLA in 1925, married Viola Minor in the fall of 1917 and for a year they were happy together in Pomona. “Then came the influenza epidemic,” he recalled decades after. 1 “Viola went up (to Oakland) as soon as she could during the Christmas holidays to her parents, but I had to wait a little before I could join them…the mother and daughter went over to San Francisco on one of those old ferry boats, you know, taking with them some of those masks that were supposed to protect people against infection in those days of Spanish flu. But what happened was that she was the one that got the flu, and presently I was informed of her serious illness, and within a couple of days, of her death.” 2

Future UCLA graduate (1932) Burton Goodman was eight years old in the fall of 1918, living in

Clermont County, Ohio, when a terrifying visit was paid to his family by the "Spanish flu" or

"Great Flu." 3 His uncle died of the flu, and then his father caught it. Goodman recalled years later, "I can still remember, as a little kid, being taken over to my grandparents' home and standing outside and seeing my father through the window. We couldn't visit him at that time." 4

Like little Burton, scholars stand outside history's window and wonder at the Great Flu of

1918 ("hereinafter the 1918 Flu"), one of the great natural disasters and killers of the last century.

Nearly 700,000 Americans and 50,000 Canadians died from the flu, and an estimated 20-100

1 Westergaard, 59. 2 Ibid. 3 The 1918 flu did not originate in Spain; rather, as Spain remained neutral in the First World War, its journalists were relatively free from government censorship and so were able to report freely on the epidemic. It seems a bit unfair to keep referring to it as the “Spanish flu,”—therefore here it is called the 1918 flu. 4 Burton Kenneth Goodman, “UCLA Student Leaders: Burton Kenneth Goodman,” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1990, 1991 by Dale Trelevan, Collection 300/359. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles. Goodman's father ended up recovering, and the family moved to Compton, California in 1922. Goodman eventually graduated from UCLA in 1932 and from the University of California's Boalt School of Law in 1935, and went on to a successful career as an attorney. Just as the flu pandemic had touched his life, so did World War I, albeit indirectly—while attending UCLA Goodman’s landlord was a British Army veteran who had been gassed in the war, and was convalescing in sunny southern California.

137 million people perished across the globe. 5 Each time a notable influenza outbreak occurs, such as the H1N1 or “swine flu” outbreak of 2009, the 1918 flu is recalled. The Center for Disease

Control reports that in a modern flu pandemic similar to the 1918 event, "deaths in the United

States could reach 200,000 and the initial cost to the economy could approach $166 billion, or roughly 1.5 percent of GDP." 6 There seems, therefore, to be little chance the 1918 flu could be forgotten (again).

Perhaps it is tempting for historians of higher education to gloss over the bloody and unheroic First World War (and by extension the 1918 flu) in favor of the popular Second World

War and the G.I. Bill, which opened the doors of opportunity for so many. Today, we recall the

1918 flu to memory, restoring it to its important place in the history of higher education, and specifically showing its significance for UCLA’s early historical development, its transition from normal school to university branch. UCLA was still the Los Angeles State Normal School in

1918, but had been transformed into a camp for World War I, and was militarized, showing it could handle being a large university with heavy responsibilities, illustrating Director Ernest

Carroll Moore and the Normal School faculty’s fight for independence and authority.

This chapter contains a short historiography of the 1918 flu and higher education, the conceptual framework, a section on methods and historical sources, a short discussion of the

1918 flu (and comparisons to a modern cousin, the 2009 H1N1 flu) a survey of common problems and experiences had by colleges, including the University of California, Berkeley and private colleges in Southern California during the 1918 flu, and a special consideration of the case of the Los Angeles State Normal School during the 1918 flu.

5 Howard Phillips and David Killingray, eds. “Introduction” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2003), 7. Canada’s population in 1918 was only 8 million, placing its flu fatalities in stark perspective. Pettigrew, The Silent Enemy , 1983. 6 United States Center for Disease Control, http://www.cdc.gov/ .

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This chapter is not a medical study, but a history of the 1918 flu, colleges and universities, and their temporary bunkmates that autumn, the Students Army Training Corps

(“SATC”) and other military training units. This timeline of the flu illustrates the close relationship between sickness and the Army’s presence on campuses: the 1918 flu took its greatest toll from September through December 1918, and the SATC operated from October 1 through December 21, 1918. Further, the flu spread in ports with Navy bases and in Army camps, and this very transient military population spread the sickness through the country.

War and pestilence came in the same package in the fall of 1918. The flu ravaged college campuses as it did the rest of the country, perhaps to a worse extent due to the closely packed barracks housing the often flu-infested men of the SATC. By spring 1919, the war had long been over, the military units disbanded and barracks emptied, and the flu had died down considerably. It was time to forget the flu—and the uncomfortably close college/military embrace felt during the war.

The 1918 flu received scant attention from historians until Alfred Crosby’s America’s

Forgotten Pandemic was published in 1977 while a H1N1 (or “swine flu”) pandemic was circling the globe. 7 Since then, historians have studied the search for the 1918 flu strain, the effects of the 1918 flu on urban areas and on various nations and regions, and its effects on institutions, like the Army and Navy. 8 One of the finest historical treatments of the 1918 flu,

7 Edwin D. Kilbourne, “A Virologist’s Perspective on the 1918-1919 Pandemic,” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: New Perspectives , 29-38 . In 1976, at Fort Dix, New Jersey, 250 soldiers contracted the H1N1 “swine flu”; in order to prevent a disaster of 1918 proportions, the federal government vaccinated 43 million people. The vaccination program was later called off as no serious flu pandemic materialized. 8 John M. Barry, The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History (New York: Viking Press, 2004); Alfred Crosby, America’s Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Carol R. Byerly, Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army During World War I (New York: New York University Press, 2005); Eileen Pettigrew, The Silent Enemy: Canada and the Deadly Flu of 1918 (Saskatoon, Saskatchewan: Western Producer Prairie Books, 1983); Phillips and Killingray, eds. The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: New Perspectives; Fred van Hartesveldt, The 1918-1919 Pandemic of Influenza: The Urban Impact in the Western World (Lewiston, NY: E. Mellen Press, 1992).

139 paradoxically, is a work of fiction. Katherine Ann Porter’s short novel Pale Horse, Pale Rider drew on her experiences as a news reporter who contracted the flu, and whose fiancé, a U.S.

Army officer, nursed her back to health only to then perish himself. 9 Although a growing number of books and scholarly papers are accumulating on the 1918 flu, (mainly due to recent outbreaks of SARS, avian flu, and H1N1, it has so far received little critical attention in histories of American higher education. 10

Historians of medicine, university physicians, and government agencies have sought to learn lessons from the 1918 flu for use in present and future flu pandemics. In 2006, the

University of Michigan's Center for the History of Medicine performed an extensive study for the federal Defense Threat Reduction Agency on communities that remained relatively unscathed from the Spanish flu ("the Michigan study"), and drew various historical "lessons" from the case studies selected. 11 Their main goal in studying the 1918 flu is to assess the effectiveness of various "nonpharmaceutical interventions" in containing the spread of a flu outbreak. These nonpharmaceutical interventions included quarantines; "social distancing measures,” i.e., closing schools, churches, theaters, etc.; and public health mass information campaigns—including instructions on use of face masks, how to cough and sneeze properly; and production of flu vaccines. Unfortunately, “no medicine or vaccines developed then could

9 Katherine Ann Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider (New York: Harcourt, Brace and Co., 1939). 10 H1N1 flu was first known as swine flu because in the lab it resembled influenza viruses common to North American pigs, yet now it is known to be very much its own unique virus. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "H1N1 Flu,” http://www.cdc.gov/h1n1flu/qa.htm, retrieved online October 21, 2015. The CDC has left this archived webpage in place for historical research, but provides updated information on H1N1, which is now a regular human flu virus that circulates each year, here: http://www.cdc.gov/flu/ . 11 Howard Markel, Alexandra Stern, J. Alexander Navarro, and Joseph Michalsen, A Historical Assessment of Nonpharmaceutical Disease Containment Strategies Employed by Selected U.S. Communities During the Second Wave of the 1918-1920 Influenza Pandemic (Ann Arbor, MI: The University of Michigan Medical School Center for the History of Medicine, 2006). These scholars studied eight communities that escaped relatively unscathed from the 1918 flu: Yerba Buena Island, California; Gunnison, Colorado; Princeton University; The Western Pennsylvania Institution for the Blind in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Trudeau Tuberculosis Sanitorium, Saranac Lake, New York; Bryn Mawr College, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania, and Fletcher, Vermont.

140 prevent [the 1918 flu.] The masks worn by millions were useless as designed and could not prevent influenza. Only preventing exposure to the virus could.” 12

The Michigan study is the most detailed and thorough example of the "historical lessons" studies, yet other colleges and universities have more informally studied past public health measures and have drawn their own conclusions as to how these past experiences might aid their institutional responses to modern flu outbreaks. 13 The limitations of historical research in past diseases, especially communicable diseases, are glaringly apparent, including changes in lifestyles, communications, travel, refrigeration, medicines, and a thousand other areas of human life and society. The Michigan study's advice on "the power and limits of historical research" holds true for this study as well:

Historical research is fraught with all the problems and limitations of retrospective studies. It should not be viewed as a controlled study. It is always an approximate, and not always applicable, guide to the modeling of contemporary or future pandemic preparedness planning. The researcher may be helped or hindered by numerous investigators, recorders, and collectors of information who preceded him or her and generally performed their work without a common reference point or even sets of uniform definitions and concepts. The historian must also rely upon archivists who may or may not have preserved this material and catalogued it in a way that aids retrieval. These issues are some, but hardly the only, limitations of any historical study, including this one. Nevertheless, history represents an essential arrow in the quiver of human inquiry. 14

The 1918 flu epidemic receives little attention in the general histories and textbooks on

American higher education, many of which are cited in this dissertation’s introduction chapter.

No articles have been identified on the 1918 flu and higher education in the major scholarly journals of the field: Perspectives on the History of Higher Education , the History of Education

Quarterly , the Journal of Higher Education , or The Review of Higher Education .

12 Barry, The Great Influenza , 358-359. 13 Mark F. Bernstein, “Why Princeton was Spared,” Princeton Alumni Weekly (December 17, 2008), 1-4. In 2008, Peter Johnson, university professor at Princeton, examined the University’s 1918 flu experience while serving on Princeton’s emergency-preparedness task force. 14 Markel, et al., A Historical Assessment of Nonpharmaceutical Disease Containment Strategies, 138.

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Several historians of higher education have identified World War I as key to the history of colleges and universities, especially pertaining to the federal government's growing role, the development of research universities, and the creation of junior colleges. In her study of

American higher education and World War I , Carol Gruber tracked the close relationship between professors, institutions and students; she examined an embrace that tightened between the federal government (especially the armed forces) and colleges and universities, which culminated in the transformation of campuses into de facto Army and Navy bases in 1918. 15

Gruber described the sharp clashes between military and academic chains of command on campuses, and also explained the faculty's growing disillusionment with the militarization of campuses and their annoyance with Army officers' disdain of higher education, accompanied by a lowering of academic standards. However, Gruber did not address the 1918 flu in detail.

Nevertheless, her analysis of the conflicts triggered by colleges working together with the federal government during World War I:

The problem that confronted the universities was a real one, which beggared simple solutions: they could not be expected to remain aloof from the social crisis of war; yet to the extent that they inevitably become instruments at the disposal of the government, their own health was endangered and so, ultimately, was the health of the society, that in the broadest sense, they served. 16

In his history of higher education between the two world wars, David Levine identifies World

War I as a "take-off point in the history of higher education,” and analyzes the SATC, but also does not discuss the 1918 flu in detail.17

Accordingly, a gap in the historiography of American higher education presently exists regarding the relationship between American higher education and the federal government, including the military, and their efforts in battling the 1918 flu. This is an important historical

15 Gruber, Mars and Minerva, 5. 16 Ibid. 17 Levine, 38.

142 problem for two reasons: first, public health measures adopted by colleges and universities in

1918 were conducted on most campuses by competing academic and military power structures, and this is not the case today. Second, both with respect to public health issues and other general concerns, the 1918 flu is a key historical example of academic/military partnership—or rivalry.

The World War I experience—and the accompanying flu pandemic—changed the trajectory of academic/military relationships for the future, and helped to solidify civilian leadership on campus, and in the Normal School’s case, showcased Provost Ernest Carroll Moore as a leader who would be able to run a full university campus. At colleges and universities between the wars, military training for students would be encouraged, and sometimes made mandatory—but barracks would stay off campus, both at UCLA, and across Southern California and the rest of the nation.

Alfred Crosby argues that the 1918 flu has been forgotten in collective memory, stating,

“the very nature of the disease and its epidemiological characteristics encouraged forgetfulness in the societies it affected. The disease moved too fast, arrived, flourished, and was gone before it had any but ephemeral effects on the economy and before many people had time to fully realize how great was the danger.”18 These reasons for collective forgetfulness hold great force with respect to the history of higher education. In the years between the World Wars, students cycled through school (usually within four years), many new colleges opened, many others closed, other schools changed institutional forms; bitter memories faded into a Jazz Age, a Great

Depression, and then came the descent into another war. The failed experiences relating to flu and military training from World War I were largely ignored after Pearl Harbor, as the nation mobilized for World War II. The years following World War II were consumed with the expansion of higher education from a mass to universal participation model, and the quest by

18 Crosby, 321.

143 universities for ever larger grants of federal research dollars. Even when academic-military partnerships were protested during the Vietnam War, critics of the "multiversity" seldom looked back upon the 1918 flu. It is only in the past few decades, with fears of mass pandemics rising, that the pestilential days of 1918 are reconsidered on many campuses.

Legal scholar Jason Marisam has considered several public health theories and their application in the 1918 flu, and one theory, "public health elitism,” carries great significance for the 1918 flu crisis as it was managed on college campuses. 19 Public health elitism is a branch of elite theory, "which holds that a group of society's elite—economic, political, and military— exercise power and shape policy" in the subject society.20 In public health emergencies, the theory of public health elitism holds that "a group of experts are in the best position to make the risk assessments and determine the protective (often coercive) measures necessary to protect the public's health." 21 In the 1918 flu outbreak, colleges and universities were expected to help advance public health measures and perform vital scientific research, and a vaccine was produced at the University of California, Berkeley and rushed into use. 22 While a nascent university faculty already was in place at the Los Angeles State Normal School, its position as a teaching and not a research institution deprived it of this research and public service mission. No vaccine could emerge from a normal school; these were inherently limited institutions, which explains perhaps why UCLA has been reticent to fully embrace its normal school origins. 23 It could never be an elite institution as a normal school.

The 1918 Flu

19 Jason Marisam, "Local Governance and Pandemics: Lessons from the 1918 Flu," University of Detroit Mercy Law Review 85 (2008): 347-383, 348. 20 Ibid, 350. 21 Ibid, 351. 22 Rex A. Adams, “The 1918 Spanish Influenza, Berkeley’s ‘Quinta Columna,’” Chronicle of the University of California (Spring 1998) , 49-59. 23 Anderson, The Los Angeles State Normal School , examines this idea in detail as the central theme of the work.

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The 1918 flu was only the most costly and lethal of several pandemics in the twentieth century, including those of 1957 and 1968, and the swine flu outbreak of 1976. Scholars have likened the 2009 H1N1 to the 1918 flu pandemic in its powers to burrow deep into human lungs, causing infection, pneumonia, and possibly death. This attribute is shared with the 1918 flu, but not the typical seasonal flu, which stays near the top of the lungs—sickening the patient but not usually causing pneumonia. Second, deaths caused by the 1918 flu are represented graphically as occurring in a "W" form on age distribution charts, that is, young and healthy adults were more vulnerable to it than their older and younger peers. This is unlike seasonal flu, which, when fatal, kills the very old and the very young (and therefore has no spike in the middle of its age distribution mortality chart, no "W.") 24 The Center for Disease Control confirmed that the

H1N1 flu is "a disease of the young," in which 65 percent of fatalities in autumn 2009 were among adults aged 25 to 64, and only 12 percent were among adults 65 and older. 25 Therefore, the survivors of the 1918 flu (while few are alive today) had little to fear from later outbreaks of similar flu strains, for example in 1957, 1968, and 1976. Third, like all flu pandemics in human history, the 1918 flu traveled along the roads, rails, and seaways of travel and commerce; this trait draws great concern for pandemics and our planet today, which has been made much ever faster transportation and greater globalization.

It is likely the 1918 flu emerged in the United States that spring, and then traveled with the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) to Europe, where the flu mutated into a more potent

24 Jeffrey K. Taubenberger, “Genetic Characterization of the 1918 ‘Spanish’ Influenza Virus,” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: New Perspectives, 41-42. Taubenberger’s “W” graph described may be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:W_curve.png . 25 Ibid. In regular season flu, ninety percent of deaths occur among the 65 and older population. Younger people are less likely to have built up immunity to a swine-flu related strain, and therefore lack the immunity of their parents and grandparents.

145 strain. 26 This new and improved flu returned to the New World in a second wave in the autumn of 1918, when it did most of its damage in the Americas. Early the following year, a third wave caused more suffering and death in various parts of the world. By the summer of 1919, the epidemic in its three waves had visited Earth's every corner. (Some scholars also posit that a fourth wave ravaged Scandinavia and some South Atlantic islands in 1920, but it is possible this was a different strain of the flu virus altogether.) 27

The 1918 flu was terrible to behold, and worse to suffer. The U.S. Surgeon General described it in detail in a contemporary circular:

In most cases a person taken sick with influenza feels sick rather suddenly. He feels weak, has pains in the eyes, ears, head or back, and may be sore all over. Many patients feel dizzy, some vomit. Most of the patients complain of feeling chilly, and with this comes a fever in which the temperature rises from 100 to 104 [degrees F.] In most cases the pulse remains relatively slow. In appearance one is struck by the fact that the patient looks sick. His eyes and the inner side of his eyelids may be slightly “bloodshot” or “congested,” as the doctors say. There may be running from the nose, or there may be some cough. These signs of a cold may not be marked; nevertheless the patient looks and feels very sick. 28

This version of the flu seemed much the same as the usual variety that arrives yearly on schedule and promises a person “two or three days in bed feeling downright miserable, a week or so of feeling shaky, and then back to normal.” 29 The typical American in the early twentieth century attempted to avoid the flu, but did not fear it as keenly as smallpox, typhus, and yellow fever— the killers doctors were required by law to report to the authorities. Yet they learned quickly to fear the 1918 flu because it was so often accompanied by pneumonia. 30 Pneumonia remained the

26 Howard Phillips and David Killingray, eds. “Introduction” in The Spanish Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919: New Perspectives (New York: Routledge, 2003). 27 Niall P.A.S. Johnson and Juergen Mueller, “Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 “Spanish’ Influenza Pandemic,” Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76 (Spring 2002): 105-115. 28 United States Surgeon General’s Report, Public Health Service. “Spanish Influenza,” “Three-Day Fever,” “the Flu.” Washington, D.C.: G.P.O., 1918, retrieved online at http://ocp.hul.harvard.edu/contagion/influenza.html. 29 Crosby, The Forgotten Pandemic , 5. 30 Barry, The Great Influenza , 152.

146 most common cause of death in the United States until 1936, and even today remains high on that list, depending year to year on the virulence of the particular flu season. 31

Colleges, the SATC, and the Flu

Under the SATC program, five hundred colleges and universities contracted with the federal government to allow military training at their institutions. All able bodied male students over 18 lived, trained, and studied in barracks on campus in preparation for their deployment to

France. 32 The War Department required that colleges must have enrolled at least one hundred male students the previous semester: this excluded women's colleges immediately, and also many state normal schools, which often had low enrollments of male students. The San Diego

State Normal School, for example, was ineligible to host an SATC unit, and therefore the San

Diego Junior College was pressed into service for the task. 33 SATC units were trained in many instances by officers who had returned recently in 1918 from the fighting in Europe, and brought the Second Wave of the flu with them.

Army officers and college professors shared space as warily as two new freshmen roommates, and like many dormitory living arrangements, the experiment lasted only a few months, from September until December, 1918. Long trenches and deep foxholes were dug by student-soldiers, who also strung barbed wire, lobbed fake grenades, donned gas masks, and marched, marched, and marched across campus. The Great War had gone on for four bloody

31 Flu combined with pneumonia accounted for 2 percent of all deaths in the United States in 2012, making it the eighth highest cause of death. U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Center for Disease Control and Prevention. National Vital Statistics Reports , Vol. 64, No. 10, August 31, 2015. 32 Kent Sagendorph, Michigan: The Story of the University (New York: E.P. Dutton and Co., Inc. Publishers, 1948), 264. Sagendorph’s explanation of the SATC: "in outline it was sort of ancestor to the W-8 and other ASTP (Army Specialized Training Programs) activities of World War II, whereby the students were mobilized, immediately inducted into the Army, and then kept on campus attending classes until they could be absorbed into new training units." 33 Jefferson R. Stickney, Jr, “S.A.T.C., San Diego’s Student Army,” Journal of San Diego History 27 (3) (Summer 1981), 1-12.

147 years, and there was little indication in the early autumn of 1918 that the combatants were ready for peace. It seemed possible the military presence on campuses might be permanent.

What is notable about the individual stories of each institution below are the common threads running through each experience. The institutions mentioned below all had SATC units, with the exception of Bryn Mawr College. Each (including Bryn Mawr) implemented a flu quarantine of some kind—or had one forced on it. Colleges struggled to remain open through the crisis and had clashes of authority, from bitter to benign, with the SATC military commanders on campus. The final days of 1918 and early 1919 also saw the swift shuttering of barracks and infirmaries alike across the nation. SATC units were required to disband by the end of 1918, and flu was reported to have eased by the spring of 1919. Few physical structures remained reminding people of the flu or the military presence on campus: the sick had either died or recovered their health; the soldiers had gone home, or in some cases stayed as students, but as civilians. (And if they continued their military training, it was as a student first and part-time member of the school's ROTC, and they certainly did not live on campus barracks, which were put to peaceful purposes).

The Flu Looms: Delays and Doubts in the Fall Quarter

All colleges in the United States, facing the dangerous flu outbreak in the early fall of

1918, were forced to consider closing their doors (or just failing to open for the fall semester that year). Colleges in cities that were hit early that fall by flu, for example Boston, were particularly torn. Boston College did not open until October 15 (and even at that late date, uniforms were not yet ready for its SATC recruits). 34 In September, 1918, Harvard President Lowell believed his decision on whether to close the school would have great impact across the nation. On

September, he confided "if Harvard should postpone its opening, other schools and institutions

34 David R. Dunigan, A History of Boston College (Boston: Bruce Publishing Co., 1947), 150.

148 would do likewise, and the alarm would be increased in a way that would be unfortunate." 35

Lowell recalled a wave of "infantile paralysis" from the recent past, in which it had been decided not to close Harvard, although "there was a very strong feeling on the part of some people that we ought to postpone the opening. Under medical advice we did not do so, and no cases came in consequence." 36 Consulting with the faculty, the college physician, and the Massachusetts

Superintendent of Public Health, Lowell decided not to postpone Harvard's opening. However, these medical experts gave cautionary advice on flu prevention measures, such as "not overcrowding the barracks," "avoiding meetings of large classes,” and maintaining "a careful supervision and treatment of the students here." 37 These measures required both Harvard and the military's energetic action—and moreover, their close cooperation—a theme discussed further below.

On October 1, 1918, the first day of the SATC's operation at Dartmouth College, classes were cancelled for two weeks (a measure credited by the school with limiting the spread of the flu, when considered in conjunction with the SATC's mandating nine hours of outside marching and drills for their student-soldiers). 38 President Hopkins described the situation to a Dartmouth trustee in an October 4 letter: "the influenza is letting up. I did not follow the suggestion of the

War Department that we suspend operations until October 10 for we were so near panic that I felt the whole College would disappear if that were done. The doctors stated that plenty of fresh air and outdoor work were the best antidotes for the disease." 39

35 Abott Lawrence Lowell Collection, UAI 5.160 (Folder 403) Harvard University Archives, Records of the President of Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts (hereinafter “HU”), Letter to Joseph Lee, September 18, 1918. 36 Lowell, letter to Lee, September 18, 1918, HU. 37 Lowell, letter to Zukoski, October 1, 1918, HU. 38 Laura Stephenson Carter, “Cold Comfort,” Dartmouth Medicine (Winter 2006), 36-42, 56-57. 39 Ibid., 42.

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Universities competed with each other regarding their patriotic contributions during the

First World War, including recruiting student-soldiers for their SATC units. For example, the

University of Michigan claimed the largest SATC unit during the war; however, the University of Minnesota, with 2,600 soldier-students in its SATC unit and another 3,000 soldiers training in engineering and mechanic arts, claimed to be the largest “SATC center in the United States.” 40

A Minnesota historian pointed out skeptically “somehow the University was supposed to educate and train this boatload of new soldiers while at the same continuing to function as an institute of higher education.” 41 Prestigious private colleges joined the effort, too. Princeton strongly participated in the country’s military mobilization: in September 1918, 711 student draftees were enrolled in the Army’s SATC unit, another 322 in the Navy’s equivalent unit, and 600 in the

School of Military Aeronautics. Only 95 men, scornfully labeled by their soldier peers as “the

Diplomatic Corps,” were still registered as students in the university: they had been physically disqualified from service or were simply too young to enlist or be drafted.

In several institutional histories, criticism of the SATC program accompanies descriptions of the flu's onslaught. A University of Kansas chronicler reported that "the history of the SATC was chaotic" and a "disaster," in large part because the crowded conditions in the

SATC barracks contributed greatly to the flu's spread, which "ran rampant" during October on campus. 42 The campus infirmaries were inadequate for the crisis, and so the barracks doubled duty as infirmaries, spreading the plague further. Faculty wives, women students, and volunteer nurses working in these terrible conditions were exposed, and several died. By November 11, 32

Kansas students, of whom ten were SATC recruits, had died.43

40 Tim Brady, “The Great Flu Epidemic,” Minnesota Magazine (January-February 2005), 1-4. 41 Ibid. 42 Clifford S. Griffin, The Kansas University: a History (Lawrence, Kansas: University Press of Kansas, 1974), 378. 43 Ibid.

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Responses to the Flu: Quarantining and Other Measures

The flu reached colleges at different times, and Princeton University was hit early: on

September 5, 1918, a student-recruit training to be a clerk in the Navy was quarantined in the campus infirmary with flu-like symptoms. As the flu spread that fall, Princeton’s President

Hibben ordered that two hundred of the sickest be quarantined on campus in the Field House.

The Army and Navy commanders on campus, Colonel John Pearson and Admiral Caspar

Goodrich, took prudent measures to defend their soldiers and sailors from the flu. On October 1,

1918, the Princeton Board of Health closed all public meeting places. Shortly thereafter, a committee was constituted comprising Colonel Pearson, Admiral Goodrich, the university chief physician, and the town of Princeton’s head public health officer so that measures might be properly coordinated in the area. Until November 7, 1918, (four days before the end of the war) soldiers and sailors were prohibited from visiting the flu-plagued cities of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. 44

Wisconsin had a different experience with the epidemic, as it was “the only state in the nation to meet the crisis with uniform, stateside measures that were unusual both for their aggressiveness and the public’s willingness to comply with them.” 45 On October 10, 1918, the

State Health Office closed all public institutions, which included schools, churches, and theaters.

The first Spanish flu cases in the city of Madison, Wisconsin had been reported in early October at the university. The University of Wisconsin did not share Princeton University’s good fortune in avoiding deaths from flu and pneumonia. Perhaps this was due to the sheer size of the

44 Bernstein, “Why Princeton was Spared,” 5. There was no similar cordon surrounding Princeton’s campus regarding outside visitors; for example, parents were permitted to visit campus for a parade in which future Supreme Court justice John Marshall Harlan, but then merely the student commander of the Navy’s training unit, led the recruits under his command in a march around campus singing Princeton fight songs. 45 Stephen Burg. "Wisconsin and the great Spanish flu epidemic of 1918," Wisconsin Magazine of History 84 (2000- 2001), 39.

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University’s SATC unit of 4,000 student-soldiers, or perhaps caused by the necessarily tight quarters the barracks on campus afforded.

As mentioned above, the large state flagship universities (such as Wisconsin, Michigan, and Minnesota) tended to have large Army SATC units, and the University of Michigan claimed to have the largest in the United States, with over 3,600 soldier-students enlisted by Armistice

Day, November 11. 46 The large new Michigan Union building served as barracks and mess hall for the unit, along with a temporary mess hall structure directly next to it. As with other universities and their SATC units, the tight quarters in the barracks sped the onslaught of the flu.

As in Madison, Wisconsin, the first flu cases in Ann Arbor, Michigan were reported in early

October at the University among the SATC unit. On October 16, 1918, Ann Arbor’s chief public health officer closed all public gathering places, and on October 17, the University of Michigan

President ordered students and professors to wear gauzy flu masks at all times. 47 Public meetings of any kind were banned by the city’s Public Health Officer in Ann Arbor from

October 16 through November 7, 1918. Quarantines were set up on campus at Waterman and

Barbour Gymnasium, the homeopathic hospital, and the contagious disease ward.

As with SATC units on other college campuses, Minnesota’s soldier-students were camped in barracks at the Exposition Building, near St. Anthony Falls, which gave the flu a great advantage in its spread among the student-soldiers. On September 28, 1918, the first flu case was reported on campus, and within 24 hours, the University Health Service was very busy tending to sick patients. 48 On September 29, 1918, University of Minnesota President Burton

46 Sagendorph, Michigan: The Story of the University , 266. 47 Ibid, 270. 48 Tim Brady, “The Great Flu Epidemic,” 10. The University of Minnesota had the great good fortune of launching its new University Health Service in 1918. The Service’s first Director, Dr. John Sundwall, was hired in September 1918, just as the influenza epidemic grew. Soon after his hire, Dr. Sundwall feared a flu disaster on campus, and in fact the epidemic visited the University of Minnesota a bit earlier than most other colleges and universities.

152 postponed the fall opening of the university, and then postponed it twice more in later weeks.

From late September through October, the University Health Service was treating one hundred patients per day in offices improvised in fraternity houses along University Avenue, spilling over to dorms and barracks. On October 11, 1918, Minneapolis closed all public meeting places. At this time, “the influenza epidemic was at its height and it was a dull morning when two or three student-soldiers did not tumble forward on their faces at reveille to be carried away to the hospital.” 49

Colleges without SATC units nevertheless employed stringent policies to limit the spread of the flu. An interesting example is Bryn Mawr College, which is included here to assess a different approach taken by M. Carey Thomas, one of the most influential leaders in women's higher education in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. 50 With respect to "public health elite" theory, at Bryn Mawr no army or naval officers, and no male college president or town mayor gave orders to M. Carey Thomas on what to do with respect to the flu pandemic.

Yet Thomas, well read in the day's medical journals, did defer to the best scientific advice of the time; notably, Thomas authorized widespread vaccination of students, staff, and faculty. Thomas also enacted stringent measures shortly following the appearance of the first flu case on campus, which was on September 26, 1918. Shortly after, she quarantined the campus, preventing anyone not present the time this was begun until November 7, 1918, when flu cases had begun to

According to the first annual report of the Health Service, many flu deaths had been averted thanks to the new Service, and its doctors and nurses, several of whom lost their lives in the pandemic. 49 James Gray, The University of Minnesota: 1851-1951 (Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 1951), 251. 50 Thomas’s biography is given superb treatment in Helen Horowitz, The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas , (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 1999). Thomas raised a generation of women students committed to excellent education, with long lasting influence; Lucy Guild Toberman, one of UCLA’s outstanding women students in the late 1920s, who had one grandfather who fought for the Union and another who fought for the Confederacy, recalled about her childhood on Lookout Mountain, Tennessee: “in Tennessee not everybody went to college. They made a debut and didn’t bother.” But her mother had attended Bryn Mawr: “she thought that you would never make it if you didn’t have an education.” Toberman, 10.

153 significantly drop at Bryn Mawr. Thomas's other flu prevention orders for the college's students, staff, and faculty included 1) avoiding large gatherings; 2) getting plenty of rest and exercise; 3) staying away from the local town; 4) a ban on the use of public transportation; and 5) no visiting private homes without the president's permission. President Thomas even levied a $5 fine on "all students who did not use a handkerchief when coughing or sneezing." 51 These measures were intended to outdo in caution the Pennsylvania Board of Health and thereby dissuade the Board from ordering the College closed (in late October the Board had recommended all public schools be closed).

As tough as Bryn Mawr's measures appear on paper, in practice there were loopholes and exceptions: a student was found shopping in a Philadelphia department store, not all chapel services, patriotic rallies, and sporting events were cancelled, and even "Lantern Night,” in which sophomores handed lamps to freshmen in a bit of nighttime pomp, was permitted to go forth. 52 Yet no flu deaths were reported (qualifying Bryn Mawr as a case community for the

Michigan study) and the college never closed during the crisis.

An estimated 1200 to 1400 people (soldiers, student-soldiers, nurses, professors, etc.) were infected by the 1918 Flu at the University of California, Berkeley. It arrived at Berkeley on

October 6, 1918, via soldiers arriving from the east coast, and within a week nearly fifty soldiers were ill with the flu. 53 The SATC's local commander did not order a quarantine of his troops until October 22, and by this time nearly five hundred students were sick, seven were dead, and several large university buildings had been converted into field hospitals. 54 University President

Benjamin Wheeler had ordered the mandatory use of influenza masks on October 21, the day

51 Markel, et al., A Historical Assessment of Nonpharmaceutical Disease Containment Strategies , 104. 52 Ibid. 53 Rex A. Adams, “The 1918 Spanish Influenza, Berkeley's Quinta Columna ,” Chronicle of the University of California , Spring 1988, 56. 54 Ibid.

154 before the SATC quarantine. The university and military authorities' orders were vague in their application raising questions of whether the quarantine applied to the non-military parts of campus and whether masks were required to be worn in army barracks on campus. By the time these conflicting issues could be decided, the 1918 flu pandemic had eased its grip.

The Army's efforts to fight the 1918 flu were haphazard and ill organized. Access to experience and professional medical care depended on the type of college at which student- soldiers fell ill. At San Diego Junior College, for example, where nearly a hundred SATC trainees were enrolled, while the flu raged through fall 1918, a hospital was improvised in a classroom next to the cafeteria. As recruit G. Burch Mehlin had shown interest in a career in medicine, he became the group "doctor.” 55 According to a fellow SATC trainee, "During the quarantine, he [Mehlin] had the duty of daily spraying with gasoline the throat of every recruit.

It did not make any sense to Mehlin and he was the only one who was not sprayed. It was somewhat of a miracle that the gasoline and a lighted match never came close enough to cause an incident." 56

Academic/Military Conflicts of Authority During Flu Pandemic

The first week of October witnessed stubborn efforts by academic and military leaders at the University of Wisconsin to dampen fears of a flu outbreak. The dean of the university’s school of medicine advised the university’s Acting President that this was merely a very bad cold season, and the campus SATC commandant, Major E.W. McCaskey, denied his soldiers were suffering from any flu crisis. However, on October 9, an SATC soldier (and university student) died at a local hospital of pneumonia cause by flu. Burg’s judgment is that “it seems unlikely that either military or university officials intentionally intended to deceive the public. Rather,

55 Stickney, 2. 56 Ibid.

155 since the early stages of influenza were virtually indistinguishable from a bad cold, both had probably hoped for the best until the tell-tale blue-black corpses removed any doubt about the crisis they faced.” 57 However, by the second week of October, so many cases of flu were occurring that 300 engineers were removed from their temporary barracks at the University Club so that it could be used as a temporary infirmary. At Pomona College, it took a direct order from the State Board of Health to separate the college’s SATC unit from the rest of the students and confine them to a prescribed physical area on campus. 58 These strict measures were taken even though only two cases of pneumonia arose from the Pomona SATC unit’s flu patients.

The flu crisis brought many makeshift measures at colleges. Every type of campus building was pressed into use as infirmaries, hospitals, or quarantine areas. In an extreme case, the SATC units at the University of Pittsburgh, Duquesne College, and Carnegie Tech were so overwhelmed with sick soldiers that the Army commandeered three Pittsburgh hospitals for military use. 59 After all schools had been closed in San Jose, California, the State Board of

Health and Red Cross converted the State Normal School's main building into a hospital and infirmary. 60 In temperate areas, large classes were held outside: the University of Southern

California's War Aims class, comprising 700 student-soldiers, was often held in bleachers outdoors. 61

At Princeton, "military and collegiate authorities clashed on multiple issues, though in regard to the influenza pandemic, military authorities were given deference." 62 University of

Michigan professors were unwilling to cede their own authority, whether in regard to the flu or

57 Burg, 43-44. 58 “Segregate Students at Pomona College,” Los Angeles Times, November 1, 1918. 59 Edwin Kiester Jr., “Drowning in their Own Blood,” PittMed (January 2003), 23-27. The three commandeered hospitals were Elizabeth Steel Magee, St, Francis, and Mercy. 60 Charlotte Morton, "How Schools Fought the Flu Epidemic." Industrial Arts Magazine 8(5) (May 1919), 199-200. 61 Los Angeles Times , October 12, 1918. 62 Markel, et al., A Historical Assessment of Nonpharmaceutical Disease Containment Strategies , 74.

156 regular academic activities; the various departmental deans reported to President Hutchins that professors were often unable to hold class that fall because SATC officers "had ordered all the students out for drill and told them to disregard any instructions from the faculty on peril of court martial." 63

The end of the war and a lessening of the flu's effects brought tremendous relief to the whole nation, triggering mass celebrations on the day the peace armistice was signed between the Allies and Germany—and this relief was keenly felt at colleges. A typical experience was that of the University of Kansas: throughout the fall semester, "except for the drilling of the healthy SATC members, the University was at a deathly standstill,” and the university was nearly bankrupt from SATC expenses (not yet reimbursed by the War Department) and from medical bills piled high from the flu; moreover the institution and its people were simply exhausted. 64

The flu took a terrible toll on the University of Michigan’s SATC unit: by the first of

November, 1,200 student-soldiers were being treated for the flu, and by November 11, 57 SATC men had died from it. The flu's assault, coupled with the faculty's bitter resentment of overweening military authority, rendered that fall of 1918 "one of the University's most difficult experiences." 65 Dartmouth's President Hopkins remarked in despair, "the training detachment proposition has been so bad as to be almost tragic, and that in spite of the contribution on the part of doctors, nurses, and women of this town beyond anything we have ever seen before…what seemed so good an arrangement, namely barracking the men in the gymnasium…turned out to be in this [flu pandemic] the one worst thing possible." 66 Two doctors, including a 1918 graduate of

63 Sagendorph, 267. 64 Griffin, 378. 65 Sagendorph, 270-271. 66 Carter, “Cold Comfort,” 42.

157 the University of Minnesota Medical School, died while working to help flu victims on campus.

According to the University Health Service’s annual report to the University of Minnesota

President, one hundred people would have perished, instead of the twenty who were lost to the flu, were it not for the great efforts made by the new Service, its doctors, and nurses. 67

The Los Angeles State Normal School and the 1918 Flu

SATC units were formed at several institutions of higher education in southern

California—the Los Angeles State Normal School, USC, Occidental, Pomona, and Throop

College of Technology of Pasadena (later Cal Tech).68 Different institutions had different standards for admission to their SATC units and also varied in their courses of study. USC, for example, preferred candidates with high school diplomas, but allowed non-high school graduates if recommended by their high school principals, and approved by a credentials committee.

Occidental and Throop also required high school diplomas. Other schools, such as the Normal

School, were not so picky—no high school diploma was necessary, so long as at least three years of high school had been completed.

The SATC program benefited smaller schools; for example, Pomona (which, like many small colleges, was then struggling to maintain its wartime enrollments) reported the largest enrollments of its history (649 students) for the fall of 1918, thanks to the addition of 246 SATC recruits. Most state, city, and college-level quarantines were ended by Christmas, yet in some areas these measures persisted into the New Year. Pomona College's students returned to school in January, though the Clermont Board of Health had banned all social gatherings until January

16, 1919, and students seeking to leave town required express permission from the College. 69

67 Tim Brady, Minnesota Alumni , January-February 2005, http://www.minnesotaalumni.org/s/1118/content.aspx?pgid=1581 68 Los Angeles Times , September 22, 1918, II1 69 E. Wilson Lyon, The History of Pomona College, 1887-1969 (Claremont, CA: Pomona College Press, 1977), 187.

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Old problems from peacetime, such as building student enrollments without the artificial boost of military training units, sprung back to life.

Throughout 1918, Normal School President Ernest Carroll Moore, University of

California Regent Dickson, and the Normal School's trustees were pressing the University of

California to admit the Normal School as a branch campus. Alternative plans, which horrified the University of California and USC, were for the Normal School to seek a charter from the

State of California as a new private university or even as a new and separate state university.

Therefore the Normal School's leaders were eager to prove their worth to the public—especially during the great patriotic struggle, World War I. When the federal government and armed services called on colleges and universities to help in training military personnel, Moore and the

Normal School seized the opportunity.

The California State Normal School’s Los Angeles campus closed at the end of the 1918-

1919 school year, and reopened the following fall as the Southern Branch of the University of

California, with Moore named as Director. State Normal School records regarding the flu crisis, both official and informal, are not plentiful in the UCLA University Archives. This may be due to the transition from normal school to becoming a part of the University of California, or it might be simply items lost in the physical move from its Vermont Avenue campus (present site of Los Angeles City College) to Westwood. While other institutions, such as Harvard

University, New York University, and Oregon State University, possess records of their SATC units, UCLA has none. Further, the school newspaper The Normal Outlook stopped publishing during the pandemic, and picked up again later on in the winter of 1919. 70

70 Anderson, The Los Angeles State Normal School, 47.

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Some of the most valuable records found at UCLA’s libraries are found in the personal files of Ernest Carroll Moore. In his 1952 memoir, How I Helped Make a University , Moore recalled:

The United States government did not perform a brilliant service when it set up the administration of the Student Army Training Corps. It put it under United States Army officers and...[assigned officers] to a school whose head should also be responsible for all that took place within its precincts. The army officers were volunteer officers who had been too recently enlisted to be taken to France. They did not know their jobs. With us, they were not even devoted to it, but spent the night playing poker while men of their command were dying without medical aid. Dr. Lillian Ray, the woman physician of the State Normal School, begged to be allowed to take care of the sick men. She was told repeatedly that the United States Army could not use a woman physician. Finally conditions got so bad that even that wall broke down and Dr. Ray took charge of the extemporized hospital full of influenza patients. The woman teachers of the school volunteered to nurse these men and thanks to their efforts only a few died. 71

Moore's righteous anger still resonates in this account published three decades following the crisis. His personal diary and report to the Normal School Board of Trustees, written during the epidemic, testify also to his description above.

The first cooperation between the Normal School and the armed forces came in the late spring and summer of 1918 as the federal War Department contracted with the school to train 150 mechanics for the U.S. Army. The mechanics were trained over an eight-week semester, in which they were instructed in machine shop work, automobile repair, blacksmithing, carpentry, cement work, pipe fitting, and wireless telegraphy. 72

None of these courses had been offered previously at the Normal School, and no regular students were registered in them, only soldiers. Dr. Moore taught the war aims class, which was offered on all college campuses where military training was provided during

71 Moore, 300. 72 Ernest Carroll Moore Collection Number 124, Box 19, President's Report to Board of Trustees of State Normal School in Los Angeles, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections (“UCLA”).

160 the First World War. 73 The mechanics training class, which concluded on August 31,

1918, was considered a great success, so much so that the War Department contracted with the Normal School to train 300 men during the upcoming 1918-1919 school year.

September 1918 saw the Normal School’s transformation from a pastoral retreat in the city (it won a national award for campus design and landscaping later in the 1920s) to an Army base, complete with barracks, latrines, and an armory. The barracks were built by the California State Engineers' Department, with $15,000 provided by the State

Board of Control. The War Department eventually reimbursed the state for three- quarters of the costs. By October 11, 1918, a week after it had opened for the fall semester, the Normal School had nearly doubled in size from its normal numbers. Along with 800 students enrolled in "normal" Normal School classes, 550 Army recruits were enrolled in the Practice School, and another 47 in the Vocational Training School, authorized and funded under the Smith-Hughes Act of 1917. Normal School Saturday

Extension classes included 450 students, and University of California Extension classes, offered on campus on Saturdays, enrolled 300-400 students.

This whirlwind of activity came to an abrupt end on October 11: the Los Angeles

City Health Officer closed the Normal School campus, along with all other public gathering places, because of the spread of the flu.74 No civilian students remained. All went home to their families, who mainly lived in Los Angeles or nearby. Just like its successor UCLA, the Normal School was a commuter institution—there were no dormitories and no fraternity and sorority houses existing in 1918. Though the Normal

School was closed, the SATC training continued, along with the usual classes (including

73 See generally Gruber, Mars and Minerva , on the war aims classes offered for SATC student-soldiers. 74 Los Angeles Times , October 12, 1918.

161 the war aims class, still taught by Moore). A military quarantine was established over the

School's buildings and grounds on October 18, yet SATC classes still went on. In mid-

October, the flu reached its lethal peak among U.S. military personnel, whether located on military bases or college campuses. Yet the SATC unit on the Normal Campus continued its standard drills and exercises and routines, taking little notice of the public health crisis. Two weeks later, the flu hit campus with its full force. President Moore described the emergency in his November 14, 1918 Report to the Board of Regents, the basis for these remarks in his memoir years later:

On Monday, October 28, some forty men went down with the influenza. The Gymnasium was taken over as a hospital. Unfortunately, a week before this, the War Department had detailed the medical officer stationed here to be in duty downtown from 11:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M. each day examining candidates for officers' commissions. We wired seeking his release so that he might spend his entire time here, but he was not released. As a consequence, conditions rapidly grew worse among the men here. The medical officer himself took sick and one man died.

It had been impossible to get trained nurses and was now impossible to get physicians, and worst of all, no one knew who was in authority over our makeshift military hospital so that an appeal might be made to rectify conditions. At this point, I asked Dr. Lillian Ray, our school physician, to come out and help us. When I reported her readiness to do so to the commanding officer, objection was made to having a woman physician handle cases of this sort. "We will get a male contract surgeon,” he said. But no male surgeon could be had and the next morning Dr. Ray came out and took charge. At this point, the commanding officer took sick, and his wife with her. The care of his family and of the men of the entire command devolved upon Dr. Ray and the teachers and students who volunteered as nurses, at the risk of their lives, to take care of the sick. They have been a devoted company, working day and night in rooms and buildings which were never intended to be used as hospitals, nursing back to health a total of some eighty-three men with a loss of but three. 75

Here the clash resounded between military and civilian authority. The Army first refused the help of a qualified doctor—even in the depths of a deadly crisis—because she was female and was thus disqualified. Further, Lillian Ray was no "quack": she was a 1908 graduate of Johns Hopkins Medical School with ten years of professional experience in

75 Administrative Files of Ernest Carroll Moore, November 14, 1918 Report to Board of Regents.

162 her medical bag. 76 The protests of the head of the school mattered little to the SATC unit's commanders, even though their barracks sat on campus grounds, and their soldiers posed grave risks to themselves and to the public health. President Moore was helpless on his own campus, and his diary entry of November 7, 1918, reveals his continuing frustration with the situation:

Major McCaskey’s office sent a telegram stating that an inspection would be here next week—Major McCaskey himself was here about ten minutes today but did not let me see him—I do not understand that. I telegraphed [McCaskey’s] commanding office that I would much appreciate an opportunity to discuss our situation with him. Dr. Ray is still uncertain as to who is in command at the hospital, as am I. 77

The Army's obstinacy in the flu epidemic at the Normal School simply followed a policy of excluding women doctors (and non-White male doctors) from its Medical

Department. 78 In general, "medicine, a largely gendered profession, was completely segregated by sex in the army: doctors were men and nurses were women." 79 The Army

Medical Reserve Corps recruited physicians for the armed services, and women were legally barred from the Reserve Corps. Though professional associations of women doctors lobbied for a loophole, their efforts were fruitless. The only two options for women doctors in the Army and Navy were to work for the Public Health Service, far from battlefield triages and locked away for the most part in laboratories, or they could sign up as contract surgeons, a status affording no benefits such as pensions and bonuses

76 Dr. Ray went on to become head of medical services for UCLA’s women students, head of UCLA’s Medical Department, and in 1938 helped to found The Nursery School for Visually Handicapped Children, now known as the Blind Children’s Center, in Los Angeles. 77 Administrative Files of Ernest Carroll Moore, November 14, 1918 Report to Board of Regents. 78 Byerly, Fever of War , 30-31. African American male physicians were systematically blocked from service, though the Army was desperate for trained medical personnel. By the end of the war, the War Department created in Des Moines, Iowa, a separate and segregated training camp for black physicians; however, this only resulted in three hundred commissions being offered to these trainees. Owing to these practices, which included the ludicrous step of not transferring black doctors who had been drafted to the Medical Department but leaving them to serve in the ranks, only 1.5 percent of military physicians in the First World War were African American. 79 Ibid, 144.

163 and no ability to gain higher rank. The military offered women doctors a half-life as weak sisters to their male counterparts. 80

By the middle of November, flu cases and deaths were down nationwide and in southern California—and most importantly, in the Army itself. The order is significant and telling in how matters returned to normal at the Normal School. First, the military quarantine was lifted, so that relatives of sick soldiers were allowed to visit them in the

SATC infirmary on campus. Next, SATC classes, training, and drilling were resumed.

Last, and only after the Los Angeles Public Health Officer had authorized it, the school reopened for its civilian students as well. 81 As with the other colleges and universities that hosted SATC units, the flu and its accompanying controversies receded as swiftly as they had crashed onto campus.

The landscape of American higher education is very different today than 1918.

The nation is still fighting wars, but they are regional brushfires or anti-terrorism operations, and conscription is not in place today as it was for the two world wars and the

Korean and Vietnam wars. Most importantly, colleges and university presidents and faculties will likely never agree to share authority on their own campuses and certainly it seems unlikely they would again allow barracks to be built on their grounds. Generations of academic and military leaders have shown wisdom in not seeking to repeat their space- sharing experiment conducted under the cover of a world war. It is not entirely clear what effects the battle for authority on campuses between these two parallel power structures had on the shared struggle against influenza, but certainly these rivalries did not help fight the flu. Yet, when considered along with the other problems faced by

80 Ellen S. More, “’A Certain Restless Ambition’: Women Physicians and World War I.” American Quarterly 41 (December 1989): 636-660, 637. 81 Ernest Carroll Moore, President's Report to Board of Trustees, UCLA.

164 colleges during the First World War, the 1918 flu helped to define more sharply the social obligations, institutional missions, and physical boundaries of institutions of higher education. The flu left behind valuable gifts for the Normal School, soon to be UCLA— a keener institutional identity, a more distant and wary academic/military relationship, and the wisdom that often accompanies great suffering.

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Chapter 7: Filming College Movies on Southern California Campuses

This chapter offers a historical analysis of college-themed films in the 1920s and 1930s, examining how Hollywood filmmakers developed a college film genre in California film studios and on the campuses in their own backyards. Filmmakers sold myths about a national product— college—to a national audience, but sold it with local labor, talent, and sunshine. Hollywood’s portrayal of higher education was the result of specific artistic and economic choices (dramatic material, filming sites, casting, etc.) Taken in full, these choices led to the development of the college film genre, and these movies reflected their audience. These films offered an elitist and ethnically homogenous view of college, even while operating in California, a state that promoted mass access to higher education. UCLA’s first campus on Vermont Avenue, while too small to house a burgeoning research university, at least looked the part and was a perfect stand-in for fictional liberal arts colleges and national universities. Reynar Banham has observed that silent films shot in and around Los Angeles are “an archive of urban scenery around 1914-1927 such as no other city in the world possesses” and today we can see UCLA’s old Vermont campus as it existed then, a great gift to us. 1 Even before becoming a university with a research mission and graduate and professional schools attached, UCLA was playing the role of a big school on the silver screen. Other colleges and universities in southern California, especially Occidental

College, Pomona College, and USC provided Hollywood studios with scenic backdrops of ivy- covered halls, and in the case of USC, the enormous, iconic Coliseum football stadium. UCLA and its peers were performing the part of iconic colleges even if they did not match institutional archetypes.

1 William Hughes, “The Evaluation of Film as Evidence,” in The Historian and Film , Paul Smith (Ed.) (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978), 65.

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Examining the relationship between these films and California’s colleges also can help scholars, college students, historians, filmmakers, and others better understand the history and mythology surrounding college in the first half of the twentieth century. The growth of

Hollywood as the nation’s moviemaking capital coincided with a tremendous growth in college attendance and college building in California. In the mid-20th century, California exerted a powerful cultural influence on youth culture in the United States in a later period, from the promotion of Disneyland to various television shows like "Gidget" to the surf-inspired sounds of the Beach Boys. 2 In this study’s era, television and rock 'roll did not yet exist, but movies and moviegoing were already strongly influencing America's youth culture. This chapter explores whether Hollywood promoted a particularly “Californian” view of higher education in the 1920s and 1930s, and also to what extent the close proximity of the film industry affected California college students, especially UCLA students.

Though movies have been part of our national culture for over a century, rigorous historical analyses of cinema’s interaction with higher education have only been undertaken in the past few decades, as set forth in Table 16 below:

2 Kirse Granat May, Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955–1966 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2002), 67.

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Table 16: Principal Scholarly Studies of College-Themed Films

Author of Title Year Sample Period Covered/Structure of Study Study Size

Conklin Campus Life 2008 681 (589 From first college-themed film (1915) to the in the Movies viewed, present (2006). Nine chapters covering various 92 themes of undergraduate collegiate life. Faculty, described administration, and graduate students are from secondary subjects, with the focus on collegiate notes, life. sources) Hinton Celluloid Ivy: 1994 55 Covers college-themed films from 1960 to 1990. Higher Tracks the fall from grace of colleges and Education in universities as revered institutions and the Movies, professors/administrators as august authority 1960–1990 figures. A revolution in ideas, morals, outlooks changed society and college films reflected this trend. The narrow period of the study forces certain conclusions; a wider periodization would have placed these decades in context. Umphlett The Movies 1984 237 1920s through the 1970s. Four chapters divided Go to College into chronological historical periods: 1920s; 1930s; 1940s-1950s; and 1960s-1970s. Main purpose of book is to promote idea of college film as a distinct film genre, like Westerns. Schuth The College 1972 24 Dissertation, unpublished. Focuses on four Milieu in the films directed by Mike Nichols in the 1960s and American early '70s, with secondary attention given to Fiction Film twenty contemporary college films.

These general surveys of college films cover broad themes in higher education, especially related to undergraduate student life. Scholars have not analyzed college films in a regional context, for example, little work has been done exploring possible ties between Hollywood as the main center of film production and California colleges themselves, specifically UCLA. This chapter's aim is to fill this particular gap in the literature in the history of higher education, specifically

UCLA’s history, and the history of film.

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During the early twentieth century, Hollywood filmmakers introduced (or re-introduced) national audiences to famous American sites past and present, including the frontier West, the antebellum South, and gangster-ridden cities like Chicago. Many different aspects of American culture and institutions were also employed for dramatic use during this period. “College” was one of the main institutions Hollywood studios explored through film, and, as will be analyzed in this chapter, the settings for college films did not vary greatly. Whether using a generic institutional name or a real one, college films focused on either a large state university with a football team and immense football stadium or a small liberal arts college, which, curiously, also usually had a football squad.

College-themed movies were often filmed on California campuses, bathed in real sunshine or shrouded in fake snow, featuring California college students as extras. These films are valuable historical sources, if only because they “convey a partial visual record of a particular place at a particular time.” 3 By the 1920s, the film industry had taken root in Hollywood. A.J.

Scott argues that Hollywood reached its dominant position in filmmaking through “agglomerated economic development”—in this case, the clustering of industrial plant, labor, and creative talent in one zone of Los Angeles. 4 At the same time Los Angeles was concentrating clusters of film industry material, it was solidifying a nucleus of excellent colleges. By 1925, the Los Angeles area boasted a four-year public university, UCLA, along with private schools such as USC,

Pomona College, Occidental College, and Redlands College. In addition, the University of

California’s main campus in Berkeley and Stanford University had both emerged from World

War I as large and prestigious institutions. Yet Berkeley and Stanford's academic prestige was not displayed on the silver screen; the only film focusing heavily on both universities is Spirit of

3 Hughes, 65. 4 A.J. Scott, On Hollywood: The Place, the Industry (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 2.

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Stanford (1942), about a star high school quarterback who chooses to play for Stanford while his best friend chooses to play for Cal. The genuine rivalry between the two universities aside, the film could have been about any two rival colleges anywhere in the United States.

Hollywood reflected the growing popularity of college but distorted the image considerably. According to Robert Bulman, “genre films reflect the culture that produces and consumes them"; however, this was only partially true of the college film genre. 5 In these films, distinctions were rarely made between public or private institutions (except in cases involving the University of Notre Dame); for all moviegoers knew, Old Alma Mater could be state-funded or church-run. Despite the fact that nearly half of college students were women during this period (40 percent in 1920 and 44 percent in 1930), story lines regarding women were mainly confined to romances. With only 5 percent of 18-24 year-olds attending college in 1920,

Hollywood myths about college dominated the imagination of a public that lacked personal experience of life on campus.

The college-themed films of the period tended to focus mainly on White Anglo-Saxon

Protestant (WASP) students (with Catholic Notre Dame as the exception) and their rollicking student life, centering on fraternal organizations, athletics, partying, and romance. For an audience only recently introduced to mass college attendance and acquainted with college life mostly through films, these types of images and narratives symbolized the higher education experience. This left out, of course, all students of color and any White students not conforming to this narrow, highly specific racial ideal. Hollywood ignored, for example, stories occurring on black college campuses, with the rare exception such as While Thousands Cheer (1940), starring former UCLA star halfback Kenny Washington.

5 Robert C. Bulman, Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools, and the American Culture (New York; Worth Publishers, 2005), 3.

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During the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood studios produced roughly five to ten college- themed films each year. 6 Many of these movies included scenes that were filmed on California campuses, as set forth in further detail in Table 17 below:

Table 17: Representative Selected College Films, 1920-1940

Title of Film Year of Release Campuses where Type of college film filmed

College 1927 USC, UCLA* Campus Hijinks So This is College 1929 USC Football/Romance That's My Boy 1932 USC Football drama The Collegians 1926 Occidental Football drama The College Hero 1927 Occidental Football drama Horse Feathers 1934 Occidental Marx Brothers football comedy She Loves Me Not 1934 Occidental Musical caper Change of Heart 1934 Occidental Post-grad life Pigskin Parade 1936 Occidental Football/musical The Plastic Age 1925 Pomona Campus Hijinks The Charm School 1921, Pomona Campus Hijinks Sweetie(remake) 1929, Collegiate (remake) 1936 The Male Animal 1942 Pomona Drama about beginning professor's academic freedom College Days 1926 UCLA Campus Hijinks The Big Game 1936 UCLA, Rose Bowl Football/musical The Freshman 1925 UC-Berkeley Campus Hijinks Memorial Stadium Spirit of Stanford 1942 Unknown Football drama

Each film was selected because it was filmed directly on California campuses, or employed local college students, professors, or athletic teams, or offered a unique viewpoint on student life or social customs of the period. For example, College Days (1926) was filmed on

UCLA’s Vermont campus, now the site of Los Angeles City College. These films were analyzed for their treatment of setting (geographic place), type of higher educational institution, public or

6 Umphlett, 89.

171 private status, and curriculum and courses of study. Additional analysis focuses on the treatment of women students, students of color, faculty and administrators, staff, and alumni. This analytic approach was influenced in large part by the detailed study of nearly one hundred college- themed novels conducted by John Thelin and Barbara Townsend in 1988. 7 Admittedly, this approach underscores the limitations of using feature films as historical sources — films reveal only a “surface reality... the cinematic equivalent of the novelist’s truth, not the historian’s.” 8

This limitation, that a Hollywood film is a fiction on its face, undermines college movies as reliable primary historical documents; nevertheless, the college movies of the era are important cultural artifacts and they often reflect popular contemporary views or folk myths of college.

There are two main sources of historical data used in this paper. First, as noted, the primary sources studied herein are a sample of college-themed movies from the 1920s and

1930s. By the end of the Twenties, films with sound had begun to replace silent movies. The great motion picture studios did not properly care for or archive their silent film collections, and the reels began to gather dust and then to actually fall apart. 9 In the 1950s, film archivists began to save silent movies, and it is because of these efforts that any still remain. Today, only a fifth of all silent films ever produced in the United States are still in existence.10 Many of the existing movies are located at film archives housed at universities, public libraries, and movie studios.

Some of the films, such as College and Horse Feathers, are available for rental from Netflix or

Amazon. Others, such as The Freshman , may be viewed in separate digital chunks on websites such as youtube.com, and more material becomes available online each year. Finally, libraries

7 John R. Thelin and Barbara K. Townsend, “Fiction to Fact: College Novels and the Study of Higher Education,” In John C. Smart, Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research (New York: Agathon Press, 1988), 185. 8 Hughes, 65. 9 David Robinson, Hollywood in the Twenties (New York: A.S. Barnes, 1968). 10 J.E. Conklin, Campus Life in the Movies: A Critical Survey from the Silent Era to the Present (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., Inc., 2008).

172 hold many other films: the Los Angeles Central Library has The Plastic Age in VHS format, and

College Days may be viewed at UCLA's Film and Television Archives, where videotapes are often made available to the public for viewing on site, as the actual films are too delicate for extensive use and are too rare and valuable to loan out.

Specific data on these films and the writers, directors, and producers that created them is also available from the Internet Movie Database (IMDb) and the American Film Institute (AFI) catalog of feature films. This chapter also relies on secondary sources that discuss and explain these films, including critical reviews from newspapers and magazines like Variety , The New

York Times , and various local California publications and campus newspapers and journals such as School and Society that offered commentary on education in the popular culture.

Primary accounts of Southern California college students and faculty who worked on these films as extras, support staff, and advisors were also reviewed for this chapter. The

University Archives in UCLA's Young Research Library's Department of Special Collections were the source of various student oral histories and administrative records. Biographies of movie stars like Clara Bow, Woody Strode, John Wayne, and Marion Davies, who were college students or movie stars (or both) are useful sources. Clara Bow's personal papers, held at the

Margaret Herrick Library at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, were also reviewed, with special attention given to the fan mail she had saved for posterity. This data has been reviewed to examine the ways in which California culture was transmitted to the national audience.

Common themes and plots run through college-themed movies of the 1920s and 1930s.

A new man on campus finds it difficult to find his place on campus or win the attention of any women students. Then he finds a way to win the affections of both the student body and

173 potential paramours through his heroic efforts on the football field or in some other intercollegiate sport. One prominent exception is The Wild Party (1929), in which the protagonist is a woman college student who must end her fast-paced social life, lived mainly in local speakeasies, in order to settle down with a respectable professor. Another exception is The

Fair Co-Ed (1927) , in which the lead character is a female student, and she is doing the chasing, and she is joining an athletic squad—in this case the women's basketball team—in her pursuit of the man with whom she is infatuated. Nevertheless, the college film genre is mostly seen through the male student's perspective and women students are objects to be desired, prizes to be won. Even though colleges in California were nearly all coeducational and even though social mores were changing and the Jazz Age was on, the college films of the era still presented a

Victorian, gender-segregated environment more fitting to New England private colleges of the previous century. Perhaps myths set down in college novels found new life in college films, with little attempt made to modernize plot lines. 11

Though all the movies studied here were filmed in Southern California, only several have a California setting: So This is College (1929); That's My Boy (1932); and College (1927). The first intertitle (or "title card") scene in College , places the movie's setting "on the Sunkist slopes of the Pacific, where land and water meet—California." 12 California is not mentioned for the rest of the film. Though it is a black and white film, it is easy for the viewer to see how brilliantly sunny it was during the shoot. Yet the first scene of the film, in which the hero graduates from high school, occurs in a torrential downpour. (Perhaps he graduated a semester early in a winter ceremony in 1926, when one of the strongest El Niño events of the 20 th century was recorded).

11 Anderson and Thelin, 106. 12 College , 1927. Retrieved online December 31, 2015 at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4AIoMC3XYk , but also available on Amazon.com, and free to the viewer with a Prime membership.

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We must seek between the lines to find specifically Californian themes in the college movies filmed on the state's campuses. For example, in The Fair Co-Ed the heroine shows up to

Bingham College in her car, which the audience is told is a rarity for either male or female students. She takes pity on Bingham's athletics coach, who has no car, and as mentioned above, joins the women's basketball team to seek his attention. The scene in The Fair Co-Ed in which students protest a no-cars policy on campus makes this film one of the first to show college students collectively protesting an issue. 13 This was especially topical for UCLA students, who were already driving in such great numbers that their cars were leaving the campus’s dirt parking lots all muddy messes by day’s end. 14

In most of the college films studied here, no real college or university names were employed; rather, fictional names like "Clayton" or "Tate" College were substituted. There were obvious benefits to not using real colleges and universities in fictional settings. The plot in

College centers on the hero's joining the school's rowing squad, winning the big race and getting the girl. UCLA created the first collegiate rowing team in Southern California in 1933, as students were inspired by the Olympic Games of the previous year: this was six years following the release of College .15 Unlike today, universities did not haggle overmuch with filmmakers over the use of their campuses for filming. This is a modern concept, only recently becoming controversial. In the 1920s it was different, as shown in the minutes of the May 2, 1927 meeting of UCLA's administrative staff, in which the staff is discussing College or possibly College Days

(1926):

Mr. Underhill brought in the editorial in the Daily Bruin , claiming that films made on our campus misrepresented college life and should be prohibited or censored. Mr. Underhill

13 Conklin, 200. 14 Baldwin, 82. 15 UCLA Rowing Team. (2010). History. Retrieved November 6, 2010 at http://www.uclamensrowing.org/History.tpl?searchYR=1930 .

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stated that the scenario is submitted to him and passed on by him, but that much of the business in the film does not actually appear on the script. He also stated that the motion picture companies pay from $50 to $100 into the student loan fund for each use of the campus, that they pay for all repairs and cleaning up and for a special watchman, and that they never go inside the buildings and strictly obey all regulations. Moreover, many working students get jobs as extras for these performances. Mr. Underhill, therefore, felt that the students and the university have little to complain of and much to lose in a material way. Dr. Moore stated that the Chamber of Commerce had asked everyone to cooperate with the chief industry of Los Angeles by lending buildings and grounds whenever possible. The staff agreed to continue our present policy. 16

Today, on the issue of movies filming scenes on college campus, a rough kind of continuum exists, with Harvard University at one end forbidding all filming on campus, and with most colleges and universities allowing filming, but with some sort of script approval and requiring the payment of filming fees. USC, Pomona College, and UCLA have separate offices set up for this express purpose, with elaborate approval procedures. Such rules have become so complex that they require official university pronouncements to guide filmmakers and the public, such as UCLA’s Policy 863: Filming and Photography on Campus .17 Pomona College has maintained a relaxed and open policy toward filming on campus, and has been popular with the film industry over the decades. Always playing the part of a school but never playing itself, beginning with The Charm School (1921), Pomona's campus has stood in for Stanford University

(Beaches , 1988), the Groton School ( Eleanor and Franklin , a made for television movie, 1976), and Yale University ( Gilmore Girls , television show, 2002). 18 Today, because it is such a wildly popular filming location, Pomona's policies restrict filming to days when there are no classes and only for movies allowing hands-on learning opportunities for students. 19 Occidental College has also been popular with Hollywood filmmakers, especially for films about smallish liberal arts

16 UCLA University Archives, Charles E. Young Research Library. (1926). Minutes of Meetings of the Administrative Staff of the Southern Branch, University of California. November 2, 1926. 17 http://www.adminpolicies.ucla.edu/app/Default.aspx?&id=863 . 18 M. Balchunas, “The Duke on the Quad.” Pomona College Magazine 41 (2) (2005), 1-3. 19 Ibid.

176 colleges; perhaps this is because "in spite of its may tile-covered buildings, [it seems] to have been transported from New England, so orderly and understated is its campus style." 20 When the

Marx Brothers spoofed conventions of college life in Horse Feathers (1932), they used the

Occidental campus for their fictional Huxley College. Oddly, the same campus was used to depict the fictional Texas State College in Pigskin Parade (1936), in which a rural school battled elitist Yale on the gridiron.

Beyond working on set as extras, students interacted with actors and movie professionals on both personal and professional levels. In So This is College and That's My Boy, the great national popularity of the USC football team was exploited to promote the films—and in That’s

My Boy , actual members of USC's team were cast as actors, along with such stars as John Wayne

(who was, of course, a former USC player) and Olympic swimmer Buster Crabbe. Joe E.

Brown, a comedic actor and for a time the biggest star at Warner Brothers Studios, acted in college-themed films like Local Boy Makes Good (1931) and Maybe It’s Love (1930) and hired local students to play on his minor league baseball team and tutor his children while he filmed overseas. One of these students, Michael Frankovich lived with Brown and his family as a live- in tutor and nanny, and recalled that "in my senior year I worked a lot at the studios as an extra.

I always had a connection through Joe E. Brown to get the football player jobs in movies." 21

Apart from work, students found opportunities for socializing with actors. Beyond opportunities for employment, Joe E. Brown gave his nanny Mike Frankovich social support as well: "I [Frankovich] was only a sophomore, but he got me a date with an actress named Mary

20 Gebhard and R. Winter, 308.

21 Michael Frankovich, “Westwood Pioneers: Michael Frankovich.” Transcript of oral history conducted from 1979-1985 by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. (Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 2000), 223.

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Brian, who was a star in her day…and he gave me his Cadillac to go out. I took the top down and went down Wilshire Boulevard with Mary Brian." 22

Students danced on the edge of young Hollywood's feverish social scene and sometimes found themselves in the middle of it. Clara Bow, a major star and sex symbol—the "It" girl of the Jazz Age, was the subject of scurrilous rumors regarding the University of Southern

California football team of 1927, but these were all unfounded—the products of the feverish imagination of an exiled Hollywood writer published decades later. In truth, this matinee idol and sex symbol was just seeking the company of some people her own age who were not actors.

Bow knew nothing about football until her publicity agent, Teet Carle, who was a USC graduate and who had worked in USC's publicity department prior to moving to Paramount Pictures, brought her to the USC-Cal-Berkeley game in October, 1927. She loved meeting the players, and thought out loud in the stands about whether she should date one of them, namely, the star quarterback Morley Drury. Her publicist reminded her that the football players were students, to which she responded that she was only twenty-two years old herself. USC had no dormitories in these years, and so she looked them up at the Sigma Chi fraternity house. Morley Drury and another player double-dated with Bow and her best friend Tui Lorraine; while the ladies drank martinis at a speakeasy, the men sipped on their Cokes—the football season was still ongoing, after all. For the rest of the 1927 season, Bow hosted parties at her Beverly Hills home following

USC home games. There was no alcohol at any of these events; according to Drury and other contemporaries, it was all just wholesome fun. Even USC tackle Marion Morrison (later John

22 Ibid., 243.

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Wayne) was invited to the parties, though he was out for the year with a dislocated shoulder he had gotten while body surfing in Huntington Beach. 23

Chaste as the Trojan footballers and Clara Bow might have been, college students (along with the rest of the nation) were experiencing a vast change in sexual morality and etiquette due to people moving from farms to cities, the explosion in popularity of the automobile, the women's suffrage movement, prohibition, and increased coverage of sex in the mass media.24

The college films in this chapter reflect cultural changes, but do not offer a distinctly Californian cultural point of view on them, and the central social messages delivered are still clustered around the special and all-important goal of marriage. In College (1927), Mary Haynes is cornered in her dormitory dorm by her villainous jock ex-boyfriend Jeff Brown: I have been expelled, Jeff says, and so I am going to bring you down with me--when the house mother catches me in here, you too will be expelled. Mary is horrified and secretly telephones Ronald

(the hero, played by Buster Keaton) for help. Ronald races to her aid, sends Jeff into flight, and takes Mary into his arms. The dean and house mother burst into Mary's room and catch the two lovebirds. 'Do you know what this means?" the dean asks. "Yes," says Mary, "We're going to get married!" 25 They are then quickly married in the school chapel.

While sexual attitudes were becoming more liberal, the strict social mores of the

Victorian generation were still very much alive and active, and their influence continued. As

Paula Fass observes, "sex for middle-class youths of the 1920s had become a significant premarital experience, but it continued to be distinctly marriage-oriented and confined by

23 William Purdy, “John Wayne: College Dropout,” Paper presented at Annual Meeting of Association for the Study of Higher Education, Washington, D.C., November 2014. 24 Frederick L. Allen, Only Yesterday (New York: Perennial Classics, 2000, 1931). 25 College (1927).

179 stringent etiquettes and sharply defined definitions." 26 In response to pressure from Congress, who threatened to act if Hollywood would not regulate the content of its films, in 1930, the

Motion Picture Production Code (popularly known as the Hays Code), was composed by the film industry's leaders, the Association of Motion Picture Producers, Inc. and the Motion Picture

Producers and Distributors of America, Inc. to regulate moral issues and public decency in the movies. Yet even prior to the Hays Code, college movies adhered to a formula—movies could titillate their audiences, but characters seeking sex outside of marriage were always punished.

After the Code was issued, films were scrutinized so that they followed the "general principles" as set forth below:

1. No picture shall be produced that will lower the moral standards of those who see it. Hence the sympathy of the audience should never be thrown to the side of crime, wrongdoing, evil or sin.

2. Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment, shall be presented.

3. Law, natural or human, shall not be ridiculed, nor shall sympathy be created for its violation. 27

Such broad guidelines blocked any straightforward depiction of students' sexual follies or other questionable behavior and cleared the path for a popular and wholesome new genre: the harmless campus musical comedies of the 1930s, of which Pigskin Parade (1936) is the exemplar.

Though not present in today's numbers, there were students of color on California campuses in the 1920s and 1930s: African Americans, Chinese, Japanese, and Korean

Americans, Filipino/as, American Indians, and international students from the Middle East,

Africa, Asia, and South America as well. Yet in the movies studied here, all of the students are

White, all of the professors are White, all of the coaches are White, and all of the administrators

26 Fass, 262. 27 http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=93301189 .

180 are White. This may have led to viewers across the United States and the world being given the mistaken impression that college was an activity, a choice, a life course solely for White people.

While college movies were being filmed on UCLA's campus in the 1920s, there is historical proof that African American students enrolled there felt marginalized. At a 1926 meeting of

UCLA's administrative staff, the Dean of Women raised "the question of a dance for the colored students. These students have requested the dance since they feel they are not welcome at the general student body functions." 28 Just as White students did not want to feel "inconvenienced by a distinctive minority,” so did the film industry's leaders, and moreover, they feared repelling

White moviegoers.29 The roots of one of today's difficult problems in higher education— boosting racial and ethnic diversity—partly lie buried in the historical presentation of college going as a White endeavor, with college movies playing a big part.

Not only were students, faculty, and staff of color ignored, but common racist stereotypes and the use of blackface occurred throughout movies in general, and in college movies as well.

In College , filmed at UCLA’s Vermont Avenue Campus, Buster Keaton's character is looking for work because he has failed as a soda jerk, and he notices a restaurant is hiring a "colored waiter." 30 Keaton applies blackface makeup, and begins working as a waiter but does a terrible job. While spilling food and drink all over himself his makeup is smeared, outing him to the customers, all White, and to the kitchen staff, all African American, as White. He is then chased from the restaurant by the kitchen staff, presumably incensed that a job reserved to them has been stolen by a White man. Curiously, he is treated very poorly by the White customers when in black face, but very kindly by the African American kitchen staff; it is almost a sympathetic

28 UCLA University Archives, Charles E. Young Research Library. Minutes of Meetings of the Administrative Staff of the Southern Branch, University of California. November 2, 1926. 29 Harold S. Wechsler, “An Academic Gresham's Law: Group Repulsion as a Theme in American Higher Education,” Teachers College Record 82 (4), 567-588, 567. 30 College (1925).

181 treatment of racism from a modern viewer's perspective. However, the comic way in which the

African American cooks and waiters chase Keaton from the restaurant with their cleavers does not support this view. During this period, movies nearly always depicted African Americans in racist ways, blackface was used only to ridicule African Americans for cheap laughs with White audiences, and in a movie about college life, such a scene was inserted to produce extra laughs in case the regular slapstick physical comedy fell short. As a film historian has written of Keaton's black face gags in his 1920s films, "these gags, together with the many ethnic and racist stereotypes in the films, served to reinforce the profoundly undemocratic view that certain

American citizens were inherently comic, good for a laugh, or for making funny gags funnier." 31

College life was presented in these films as being all extracurricular activities, with athletics being supreme, with little time spent in classrooms or learning taking place. Football is considered so vital that the first intertitle scene of The Freshman (1925) reads: "Do you remember those boyhood days when going to College was greater than going to Congress—and you'd rather be Right Tackle than President?" 32 The setting of The Freshman is then set as "the opening of the Fall Term at Tate University—a large football stadium with a college attached." 33

The football scenes in The Freshman were filmed in Memorial Stadium at the University of

California, Berkeley; however, there is no mention of California and the film could have been shot at any similar stadium.34 Today, film crews can trot from coast to coast with little effort, and states lure studios with sweetheart tax credit incentives. When The Freshman and its

31 Susan E. Linville, “Black Face/White Face: Keaton and Comic Doubling,” New Review of Film and Television Studies , 2007, 5(3): 269-284, 280. 32 The Freshman (1925). 33 Ibid. 34 A college football-themed movie (and the subject of a failed lawsuit brought by Harold Lloyd's granddaughter in 2000), Adam Sandler’s The Waterboy (1998), was filmed entirely in Florida, mostly at Stetson University in Deland, Florida, and at the Citrus Bowl in Orlando, with student extras played by Stetson or University of Central Florida students, though the movie was set in Louisiana. Had The Waterboy been made in 1925, it likely would have been filmed in California.

182 contemporary movies were filmed, travelling coast to coast took longer: the first East to West

Coast airplane service (New York to Los Angeles) did not begin until 1929, and the trip was 36 hours long, requiring an overnight stop. 35 No interstate highway system yet existed, automobiles were still apt to break down on very long journeys, and cross-country train trips still lasted three days and nights.

As mentioned above, one of the only films during this period to feature (or even include)

African American college students is While Thousands Cheer (1940). This film was marketed for an African American audience; Gilmore College, the fictional college depicted, was modeled on a historically black college, and the actors and extras were all African Americans. UCLA football star Kenny Washington, who had graduated in 1940, starred as football star Kenny

Harrington. Washington had graduated the previous June: Daily Variety's November 15, 1940 review of While Thousands Cheer referred to him as "the colored All-American [who] put the

University of California at Los Angeles on the gridiron map." 36 Gilmore College is a historically

Black college, and these institutions have historically been rare in the western states.37 Gilmore

College belongs to the fictional Western Conference, modeled on the Pacific Coast Conference

(today the PAC-12). The plot centers on a West Coast gambling syndicate attempting to fix the

Peach Bowl in order to win a $100,000 bet (the real Peach Bowl game was not created until

1968). When Kenny refuses to accept a $25,000 bribe, he is abducted, but is then later rescued by his teammates, and rushes to the field where he carries Gilmore to victory. Kenny

Washington actually performed such valiant feats (the abduction and escape excepted) for a racially integrated UCLA football squad, yet this integration was not permitted to be shown on the silver screen. Washington's real experiences were replaced in the plot in order for the film to

35 Abu-Lughod, New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities, 12. 36 Daily Variety, November 15, 1940. 37 Cohen, Higher Education in the American West, 42.

183 be marketed commercially. The truth was ignored in favor of a segregated story for an often segregated viewing public.

Students in these early college films live on campus in dormitories or are members of fraternities or sororities and live in the chapter's house. Yet dormitories were rare in California colleges in the 1920s and 1930s. The University of California maintained only one, College

Hall, a dormitory for women students that was located on Berkeley's campus. UCLA had none.

Stanford had dorm rooms for barely half its students until after the Second World War; the remainder made do with rooms rented in Palo Alto. 38 Nevertheless, in the college films, students lived in dormitories, regardless of what the real situation was in California. This was likely for creative convenience: in many of the films, many gags involved stunts such as male students scaling ladders to sneak into women's dorm rooms, or stories that turned on a boy being found against school rules in a girl's room. Most importantly, placing students in dorm rooms offered opportunities to film scenes with lengthy dialogue between characters and it allowed convenient gathering areas to assemble characters, providing predictable sets for crews to construct, along with student lounges, ice cream parlors, and the like.

College films featured fraternities and sororities as the main pillar of campus life and this makes some historical sense, considering the period. In 1883, 521 fraternity and sorority chapters existed at American colleges. In 1912, this number had climbed to 1,560, and by 1930, there were 3,900 chapters in operation and 35 percent of all college students (whether at four or two-year colleges) were members of a fraternity or sorority. During the 1920s and 30s,

"fraternity members controlled and directed the network of extra-curricular and social functions and through them set the standards of clothes, speech, amusements, and attitudes that the mass of

38 M. Davis and R. Nilan, The Stanford Album : A Photographic History, 1885 –1945 (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1989).

184 the students emulated." 39 As Roger Geiger explains, “Fraternities disdained academic achievement…but they did enforce a rigid culture of conformity and consumerism.” 40

No movies depicted college as it was experienced at these new types of institutions. Yet as seen in Table 18 below, they comprised an ever increasing share of student enrollments:

Table 18: Enrollments in California Public Institutions of Higher Education, 1920-1940 41

Year Total University of California State Junior Colleges California Colleges

1920 18,850 13,860 2,721 2,269 1925 34,059 19,036 8,722 6,301 1930 56,454 19,723 9,770 26,961 1935 73,028 23,539 8,131 41,358 1940 127,654 29,423 11,874 86,357

It is perhaps due to the popular depiction of college life in films that junior college students during this period reported being dissatisfied with their extracurricular existence. In a questionnaire study published in 1930 of 3,000 California junior college students, 58 percent of the respondents believed social life did not match their expectations for college life. Seventy- four percent believed there was not enough "college atmosphere, traditions, and spirit." 42 The respondents viewed junior colleges as nothing more than glorified high schools. 43

College films depicted as taking place in other states still offer insights into the concerns of the times in California. As mentioned above, Pigskin Parade (1936) is about a rural Texas college as a football underdog battling a much more talented Yale University team. One of the minor characters in the film, Herbert Van Dyke, is shown as stirring up discontent with his anarchist and communist political activities. Van Dyke explains that he was expelled from a

39 Fass, 1977. 40 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education , 455. 41 Douglass, The California Idea of Higher Education , 358. 42 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education , 432. 43 Crosby and Brand, 1930.

185 college back East before making his way to Texas, where he soon runs into trouble and is sentenced to sixty days for disturbing the peace. 44 Only two years prior to the release of Pigskin

Parade, five students had been expelled from UCLA for organizing radical activities on campus.

This communists on campus scandal generated heavy negative press coverage in Los Angeles, and the heavy administrative response by Ernest Carroll Moore led to University of California

President Robert Gordon Sproul's reinstating the students, and to Moore's eventual removal as

UCLA's provost, as discussed in the next chapter.

Beginning with the first college films, Hollywood’s mythmaking conceivably undermined public policy efforts to improve college access in California. Over the long term, universities that were represented as elite in the films of the 1920s and 1930s, including the

University of California, retained their selective status. Although the University of California garnered prestige through scientific research and was awarded the top position in the Master Plan

Pyramid of 1960, it could not have long maintained its perch without broad popular support.

Perhaps the decision-makers of the 1950s and 1960s, weaned on memories, both of real life colleges and those on film, were more comfortable viewing college attendance as an elite activity and seeing the college campus as a privileged place.

Southern California college students acted as extras in many of the movies studied here; the films are valuable historical artifacts simply because they show what students looked like, how they dressed (or how they were costumed for their parts), and how they interacted with each other. Fashion styles from the early and mid-1920s through the 1930s change greatly: women students affecting androgynous styles, with their hair in a bob or wearing close-fitting hats shift their looks to more traditionally feminine appearances, nearly all in dresses with longer

44 Conklin; Turner Classic Movies (2010). Online Film Archives . Retrieved online October 1, 2010 at http://www.tcm.com/tcmdb/title.jsp?stid=86690 .

186 hairstyles. Men students do not alter their styles in such obvious ways, but they do affect a more relaxed, informal appearance as the Jazz Age passed into the Great Depression. However, no separate or distinct California style in fashion can be discerned—the students are dressed for all climates, and there are no "hoodies,” no surf wear, no flip-flops, no sandals.

Hollywood filmmakers, like their novel writers and playwright forbears, found college a popular subject for their viewers, and during the 1920s and 1930s they crisscrossed California campuses in creating many college films. It is apparent that a national cultural view of college held strongly through these films, but California was not presented explicitly as offering higher education in some unique or special way. Californian collegians, including UCLA students, landed a few jobs as movie extras, or had a few laughs with screen stars on and off camera.

However, the college films analyzed for this chapter do not demonstrate any special Californian approach to college or show any varying cultural perspectives held in the Golden State on higher education. The same can likely be written of today's college films, but that is the subject of a different study altogether.

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PART III

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Chapter 8: UCLA’s Origins, College Culture, Political Activities, Race Relations

In 1868, California was a much different state, with most of its people living in the northern half; San Francisco and Alameda counties comprised a third of the state population themselves. 1 The university’s main campus was located, therefore, in a location convenient to the vast majority of Californians, and as discussed in Chapter 2, Los Angeles was still a small town.

From 1868 to 1910, California transformed into a much different state, and accordingly its system of higher education transformed as well. For the first time, the U.S. Census counted a larger population in Los Angeles than in San Francisco, and the Berkeley campus (in 1922 described by Upton Sinclair as “a medieval fortress from which the intellectual life of the state is dominated.") was starting to face challenges from the south. 2 Demands for a southern University of California campus had long gone unanswered. Instead, a hodgepodge of private colleges and junior colleges, along with the State Normal School, had filled the higher education vacuum in

Southern California. Nevertheless, Los Angeles’ growth in size and in economic and political power gave its civic boosters a strong platform on which to request a public university for the south.

Edward Dickson was appointed to the University of California Board of Regents in 1913 at the age of 34, the first Regent appointed from Southern California, and his constituents demanded that he immediately raise the issue of a southern branch campus. 3 Dickson recalled,

Shortly after my appointment I was visited by various civic groups, each stressing the necessity of a university in the south. Berkeley, they pointed out, was five hundred miles away—too remote for many of those residing in the southland to pursue their studies at

1 Stadtman, 214. 2 Upton Sinclair, The Goose-Step: A Study of American Education . (Upton Sinclair: Pasadena, California: 1923), 127. 3 Dickson, 217. Dickson was an alumnus of the University of California, and was the political editor of the Los Angeles Express and likely knew well before his appointment his neighbors’ desires for a University branch.

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the University of California. Although southern California taxpayers contributed two- thirds of the supporting funds of the state university, there were no University of California facilities available. The rapid growth in population of this section, it was urged, was giving this end of the state a power and influence that could not long be ignored. A university was imperative… 4

It was not democratic impulse but pressure from wealthy civic boosters that spearheaded the drive for a southern branch of the University of California. 5 This drive was thwarted for a time by powerful financial interests from Northern California, which were well represented on the University’s Board of Regents. 6 Most of the Regents in the early 1900s were modern patricians, captains of industries, and “the grand dukes of the plutocracy.” 7 William H. Crocker, whose father was one of San Francisco’s “Big Four” railroad tycoons, Crocker’s lawyer;

Mortimer Fleishhacker, the “biggest banker in San Francisco,” Phoebe Hearst, the widow of

William Randolph Hearst and strong advocate of women students at Berkeley, the president of

San Francisco’s gas company, several other major bankers, two corporate lawyers, and a

Catholic priest who was a close advisor to the Archbishop of San Francisco (who had great influence in the operation of education in the city). Margaret Sartori, whose husband Joseph was one of Los Angeles’ major bankers, joined the Board of Regents in 1919. 8

Regent Dickson found a powerful ally in Ernest Carroll Moore, who in 1917 had come back to Los Angeles (as mentioned earlier he had previously been Superintendent of Schools from 1906-1910), to become the head of the State Normal School. Dickson and Moore met in

4 Dickson, 4. 5 Ibid. The civic groups Dickson listed were various chambers of commerce from towns and cities in Southern California, the California Congress of Parent-Teacher Associations, the Los Angeles Teachers Association, and the Women’s University Club. 6 University of California Digital Archives . Retrieved online May 9, 2007 from http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/uchistory/general_history/overview/regents/timeline.html . In 1919, the University of California’s Board of Regents were: Phoebe Apperson Hurst, Benjamin Ide Wheeler; Arthur Foster, Guy Chaffee Earl, John Britton, William Henry Crocker, Phillip Ernest Bowles, Charles Stetson Wheeler, James Moffitt, Charles Ramm, Rudolph Taussig, Clement Young, Edward Dickson, James Mills, Chester Rowell, William Stephens, George Roeding, Wiggington Creed, Byron Mauzy, Mortimer Fleishhacker, Henry Wright, David Prescott Barrows, William Wood, Margaret Sartori, and George Cochran. 7 Sinclair, 128. 8 Ibid.

190 late 1917, with Moore wanting the Regents to take over the Normal School and make it a teacher’s college, and Dickson wanting a college that could at least offer classes for the first two years toward a bachelor degree.9 Dickson proposed this to his unenthusiastic fellow Regents in

Oakland, while confessing years later, “…what I really was proposing was far more significant than merely creating a teachers’ college—or even the first two years of regular university work.

My ultimate goal was a full-fledged university.” 10

Newspaper editors, University representatives, and northern California Regents resisted the development of a southern branch. They argued that scarce public resources would be wasted in duplicated administrative functions, that splitting the University into multiple campuses would destroy its role as a unifying symbol for the State, and that the proposed large new teachers college would be inconsistent with the research mission of the University. A powerful alternative to University action existed, however, that “southern California interests would make good explicit threats to create a competing public university if the Regents persisted in ignoring their calls for service.” 11 The University responded primarily to fears of this potential southern rival, and opened its southern branch campus in the fall of 1919.

The State Normal School’s students, faculty, and alumni endorsed becoming a branch campus of the University of California, but the changes were not all to their benefit. 12 For example, California Attorney General Ulysses S. Webb denied the claim of all Los Angeles State

Normal School teachers for their full retirement fund benefits when they were fired by the

University of California in 1921. As employees of a state normal school, these teachers had paid

$1 per month into the state’s retirement fund from 1913 to 1919, but as University employees

9 In 1917, Moore’s goal was to create a west coast version of the Columbia Teachers’ College. 10 Dickson, 19. 11 Stadtman, 220. 12 “State Normal School Alumni Favor University Affiliation,” Los Angeles Times , February 23, 1919.

191 were no longer eligible for these benefits. 13 Ernest Carroll Moore was forced to battle for their benefits during the legislature’s next session, so that an exception could be made for them.

Though a small matter, it illustrates the University’s impatience to discard and be done with many Normal School teachers and staff. In the 1920s, Moore continued to be a strong advocate for the former missions and personnel of the defunct Normal School, often battling Berkeley’s leadership, especially when the move to the new Westwood campus was being planned.

According to Robert Underhill, UCLA’s Assistant Controller, University of California President

William W. Campbell planned to “leave the teachers college back on Vermont Avenue and take just the letters and sciences to the promised land…he was going to leave all the people that came over from the Normal School back on the Vermont Avenue campus and let it be a teachers college. I’ve no doubt that he would have given the teachers college away if he could have got his way with that, too.” 14 Professor Waldermar Westergaard recalled this plan, too: “Campbell hoped to separate and leave Moore in charge of the…State Teachers College, while we set up another place with another man in charge of the University [at its new Westwood campus.] I think that’s something that isn’t generally known.”15 However, Edward Dickson ensured that

Moore stayed, and Moore made sure the Teachers College, and many of the former Normal

School faculty, came along too.

UCLA's first few years did not presage the later emergence of one of the country’s great research universities, and many dismissed the new school merely as a “twig.” 16 This was not in the spirit of the new venture. George Cochran, a Normal School trustee, spoke for many of the

13 “Ex-Teachers’ Rights Lost, Wood Rules,” Los Angeles Times , July 15, 1921. 14 Underhill, 100. William Campbell was President of the University of California from 1923 to 1930. 15 Westergaard, 96. 16 John B Jackson, “UCLA Student Leaders: John B. Jackson.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1989 by David Gist. Collection 300/338. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 4.

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Southern California supporters of the new campus, claiming, “under the proposed move, we are to have our own staff of professors, not any sent to us by Berkeley. The whole [operation] will be strictly local, though, by arrangement of courses, part of the State University. There will, of course, be no rivalry.” 17 In fact, the University authorities in Berkeley and Oakland did not envision independent action by their Los Angeles counterparts. A committee with no members from the Southern Branch fixed the curriculum for the Los Angeles campus. Two Berkeley professors visited UCLA classrooms, evaluating the former Normal School faculty’s fitness to serve the University. Many Normal School teachers were found wanting, and by 1921, fifty faculty members had been released from their duties in Los Angeles. 18 Berkeley approved all

UCLA requisitions for supplies and equipment; this approval process averaged two weeks on average and was a great inconvenience. 19

Charles Henry Rieber, a professor of Philosophy, had been Dean of the Summer Session at Berkeley and enjoyed great success there, but when the University of California built

Memorial Stadium, the new edifice blocked his house’s views of the surrounding hills. 20 UCLA alumnus John Jackson recalled, “[Rieber] was very unhappy, never got over it, this lovely home right up there on the hill with the trees and all, so he asked to be transferred to UCLA.” 21

Rieber’s resentment was to UCLA’s benefit, as when he became Dean of the College of Letters and Sciences, he pushed for the campus’s independence, even in small ways, as such as office products, as Jackson relates, “[Rieber] had some stationery made, and on it he put “University of

17 Ask Unit Here of University: Teachers’ College Advocated for State Normal,” Los Angeles Times , December 14, 1918, II1 18 Stadtman, 225. 19 Ibid. 20 Susan Kerny, “Memorial Stadium: Controversial from the Start,” http://berkeleyheritage.com/berkeley_observed/berkeleyobserved90203.html . Images of Rieber’s house can be found in Janice Thomas, “Strawberry Canyon, a Mountain Gorge.” http://berkeleyheritage.com/berkeley_landmarks/strawbcanyon.html . 21 Jackson, Oral History, 17-18.

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California at Los Angeles. And right away, he was reprimanded by Berkeley…they told him he was not to make stationery like that, so he went right out and made some more. He said, ‘we will never be a full-fledged university as long as we’re a branch.” 22 Rieber made an immediate impact with students as well, and gave Ralph Bunche lifelong inspiration; while he attended

UCLA at the Vermont campus, Rieber was Bunche’s professor in Philosophy of Religion.

Before Bunche left to work on a United Nations mission to Palestine in 1947, he wrote to Rieber, saying, “I will need on this mission all of the philosophy, vision, and patience which you and

McIlwain taught me—and more.” 23 James Lloyd, the editor of the 1928 Southern Campus student yearbook, dedicated it to Rieber, explaining,

[Rieber] basically fell into the category of idealism as contrasted with pragmatism represented by Dr. Moore. He represented the person who says, “You are here to learn how to make a living, but you’re also here to learn how to live…He would quote, I guess it was [Kahlil] Gibran, the Prophet, who said, in effect, ‘If I had two coins, I would spend one to buy a loaf of bread. I would spend the other for a bouquet of hyacinths.’ See this idea? So you can see how this was a real oasis for all of us, because the rest of the time we were jumping through hoops. We were taking this course because of Dean Rieber. He was one of the most loved men. 24

Flora Scott, who was hired by Berkeley in 1925 as a professor of Biology and then transferred down to UCLA, said of those early days, “Nobody knew what the Southern Branch was at that time,” she said, going on to explain, “I was on top of a double-decker bus on a very nice day. There was a Los Angeles lady with her visitor. The visitor said ‘What are those big buildings there?’ ‘Oh,’ said the Los Angeles lady, ‘that’s the University of California. It is a branch of Berkeley.’” 25

22 Jackson, Oral History, 18. 23 Ralph Bunche, June 10, 1947 letter to Charles Rieber. UCLA Young Research Library, Department of Special Collections. Charles McIlwain was a professor at Harvard, which Bunche attended after graduating from UCLA. 24 Lloyd, 85-86. 25 Flora Murray Scott, “Chequered Career: Scotland to U.S.A.” UCLA Oral History Department interview, 1973, UCLA Department of Special Collections, 35. Born in 1891, Scott attended the University of St. Andrews, the first British university to admit women students, and later received her Ph.D. (biology) from Stanford University in 1925. During World War I, Scott worked in a munitions plant in Scotland, and then after her brother died in Palestine,

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UCLA’s being granted a fourth year of study in 1924 boosted its ability to attract talented new research-driven professors. Unlike the exhausting months-long hiring process of telephone interviews and job talks of today, for Flora Scott, it was easy to be hired, with Dr. Olenus

Sponsler (also recently hired, in 1922, fresh from a Ph.D at Stanford) handling everything—she never interviewed with anyone, but just came to work. Many years later, in 1949 Scott was appointed to Chair of the Department of Botany, but when she was first hired and inquired about her leadership prospects, she recalled, “I was the only woman in the department, and the boys used to say to me, ‘Well, Scottie, you would make a good chairman, but of course, you’re a woman—you won’t be appointed.” 26 Like Sponsler, Vern Knudsen came to UCLA in 1922, two years before it had been granted the fourth year, having just received his Ph.D. from the

University of Chicago, joining UCLA’s tiny physics department and rejecting offers from the

University of Chicago and Bell Telephone Laboratories. 27 Knudsen built graduate studies at

UCLA from scratch, serving as Dean of Graduate Studies and later of the Graduate Division, from 1924 to 1958. Knudsen built close ties from UCLA to the community through his consulting work on acoustics at the Hollywood Bowl, and brought the campus national recognition as President of American Acoustical Society (1933-35). 28

Through the 1930s, American universities welcomed academic refugees from Nazi

Germany and Nazi-occupied Europe, and UCLA was expanding at the right moment to take advantage. The famous Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg left Germany in October 1933 after his lifetime contract with the University of Berlin was cancelled under Nazi pressure, and

joined the Women’s Army Auxiliary Corps and went to France. For her service, she was gazetted a Member of the British Empire. 26 Scott, 31. 27 “Verne Knudsen,” University of California In Memoriam: March 1976, retrieved online at http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb9k4009c7&doc.view=frames&chunk.id=div00031&toc.depth=1&toc.id =. 28 Stadtman, University of California Chronicle , 333.

195 he took a position at the Malkin Conservatory in Boston. 29 In 1936, UCLA composition professor Theodore Sterans died, and Vern Knudsen lobbied the University of California’s administration to hire Schoenberg, luring him from USC, where he had lectured the previous year. 30 Although he thought his salary would be double the figure, Schoenberg accepted UCLA’s offer of $4,800 and full tenure. 31 UCLA did not even have a music library and did not award a

Ph.D. in Music until 1949, but because it was a state institution and the Great Depression still ran strong in the area, it had great financial advantages over its private competitor, USC. 32

Furthermore, UCLA allowed Schoenberg, who needed the money as he had become a father late in life and had young children to support, to retire at 70 rather than the standard 65 years of age. 33 Schoenberg loved the bright sun and outdoor lifestyle of Los Angeles (which helped his asthma in these pre-smog years), often playing his graduate students in tennis, along with fellow artists like George Gerschwin, and he entertained American and European émigré artists at his house, such as Richard Neutra, Harpo Marx, and Peter Lorre, and Otto Klemperer.34 Gerald

Strong, one of Schoenberg’s students and a teaching assistant for his classes, believed that

UCLA in the 1930s was trying hard to break from its Normal School past, and that hiring such an avant-garde, world-renowned artist would greatly boost its academic credibility. 35

In the early 1920s, the city of Los Angeles and surrounding areas continued to grow ever faster, as did the regional pool of aspiring collegians. In 1921, UCLA reached maximum capacity at its Vermont Avenue location, as enrollments had reached 3,000. Gone was the hope

29 Dorothy Lamb Crawford, “Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles.” The Musical Quarterly 86 , no. 1 (Spring 2002), pp. 6-48, 6. 30 Sabine Feisst, Schoenberg's New World: The American Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 209. 31 Ibid. 32 Ibid. 33 Malcom McDonald, Schoenberg (New York : Oxford University Press, 2008, 2 nd Ed.), 116. When Schoenberg was forced to retire at 70, he had children of 13, 8, and 4 years of age, and his pension was only $38/month, and his retirements were a struggle. Crawford, 33. 34 Crawford, 6. 35 Ibid., 22.

196 that students would be satisfied taking a two-year course in Los Angeles and then transferring to

Berkeley. A female student remembered the campus attitude, “…we were in the beginning of everything. Everything was new. There was nothing organized as a college, per se, so as a result we were terribly unhappy with the fact that we had to be called a branch…we were very conscious of that. We wanted to be a four-year college.” 36 Regent Dickson wrote, “it had been assumed by many that most students taking their first two years at Los Angeles would find it impossible to go to Berkeley or elsewhere for their third and fourth years. But experience proved that this involved many difficulties, and soon there developed the demand for a third year.” 37 Many of the same groups that had pressured the Regents into taking over the Normal

School now clamored for a third year for UCLA.38 Language invoking a North versus South struggle akin to the Civil War remerged in the debate surrounding a third year for the Southern

Branch. Supporting a San Francisco Chronicle editorial arguing against a third year for Los

Angeles, University of California President Barrows warned, “If something in the nature of an academic rival, laying siege to the State Treasury for the limited funds which are available for higher education, is to be established in Los Angeles, not only will higher education suffer in this state, but the prosperity of our union as a people will be grievously hurt.”39 Past opponents to this idea were easily quelled this time, and the Southern Branch secured a third year, followed quickly by a fourth year.40

UCLA’s New Students

36 Evelyn Woodroof Field. “UCLA Student Leaders: Evelyn Woodroof Field.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1989 by David Gist. Collection 300/343. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 21. 37 Dickson, 28. 38 Ibid. 39 Dundjerski, 68. 40 Hamilton and Jackson, 36.

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UCLA was located for the first decade of its existence on Vermont Avenue at the site of present day Los Angeles City College near downtown Los Angeles. In the 1920s, Los Angeles still physically resembled older cities, as economic and social activity still centered upon a downtown business center. Downtown contained more than 75 percent of the city's businesses, and traffic was abysmal: "by 1924, over a million people per day—more than the entire population of the city—were traveling to and from downtown." 41 Most Angelenos still worked and shopped downtown; other business centers such as the Miracle Mile on Wilshire Boulevard and Century City did not yet exist. The San Fernando Valley had only recently been annexed by

Los Angeles; Santa Monica and Venice were small windblown towns, and Pasadena's population numbered only a few thousand.

The lingering effects of World War I had a strong impact on UCLA’s early enrollments and student life. In the first full academic year after the end of the war, 175 injured servicemen enrolled in various non-university courses in vocational and technical training, paid for by the federal government under the Vocational Rehabilitation Act of 1918. This Act either trained disabled soldiers or sailors for new careers if they were physically unable to return to their former ones, or paid for retraining classes for veterans who were only slightly disabled but able to return to their old careers. 42 UCLA’s Federal Classes, as they came to be called, were not permitted to take regular UCLA coursework until the 1922-23 academic year, and were never permitted to participate in intercollegiate athletics. 43 Discouraged from joining in regular campus, life, they formed the Federal Class Student Society, which grew from 27 students in

1920 to nearly 500 in 1922. The Federal class formed their own athletics teams, with the baseball

41 Paul Gleye, The Architecture of Los Angeles (Los Angeles: Rosebud Books, 1981), 112. 42 Scott Gelber, “'Hard-Boiled Order': The Reeducation of Disabled WWI Veterans in New York City ,” Journal of Social History 39 :1 (2005): 161–80, 163. 43 Southern Branch Yearbook , 1922-23, 278. By a special ruling of the Veterans Bureau, forty Federal class students were allowed to register in UCLA courses as specially admitted students.

198 team playing in the semi-pro leagues of Los Angeles. 44 While African American soldiers comprised 13 percent of active personnel in World War I, and 200,000 soldiers served in

Europe,45 no African Americans, and no students of color appear in the yearbook photos of

UCLA’s Federal Classes. Disabled Black veterans were funneled by the Veterans Bureau to

Historically Black Colleges and Universities (“HBCUs”) such as Wilberforce College and

Howard University, which allowed enrollees to take courses leading to careers in law, medicine, dentistry, teaching, and business. 46 The failure of veteran students to join UCLA’s greater campus offered sharp lessons for colleges and universities following World War II when a massively extended program under the G.I. Bill brought a wave of veterans to campuses and transformed higher education.

Lower tuition costs and a convenient location near downtown helped to make UCLA a popular college choice, and the rolls of first-year students were dominated by graduates of high schools in Los Angeles County, especially from schools within city limits. It proved difficult for non-resident students to fit in with the southern Californians. Eugene Conser, for example, graduated from high school in Minnesota and in 1925 transferred to UCLA after a miserable freshman year at the University of Minnesota. He explained his outsider’s experience as a new student: “I was a complete nonentity on the campus, not having gone through high school here.

Most of the people—certainly it must have been 99% of them—were probably coming out of local high schools.” 47 Conser exaggerated, as UCLA incoming classes were consistently comprised of 70-80 percent of students from in-state, and 30-40 percent from high schools

44 Ibid., 281. 45 “African Americans in World War I,” Oxford African American Studies Center, retrieved online, http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/features/archive/0508/index.jsp . 46 Jennifer D. Keene, “African American World War I Veterans and Veterans’ Policies,” in Veterans’ Policies, Veterans’ Politics , ed. Stephen R. Ortiz (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2012), 197. 47 Conser, Eugene. “UCLA Student Leaders: Eugene Conser.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1989 by David Gist. Collection 300/357. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 32.

199 inside the city limits, as shown in Table 19. His memories, though, of being surrounded by locals, are interesting to note.

Table 19: New Undergraduates by Location of Last (Source) School: 1922-29, 2014 48

Year Total Students % From % Number from L.A. of New Cal. County Students Schools

1922 1,555 1,291 83 1,017 65 1923 1,987 1,460 73 1,147 58 1924 2,135 1,604 75 1,274 60 1925 2,207 1,714 78 1,379 62 1926 2,167 1,648 76 1,340 62 1927 2,062 1,650 80 1,335 65 1928 1,846 1,452 79 1,153 62 1929 1,728 1,357 79 1,061 61

2014 8,931 7,008 78 3,129 35

Blanche Noble Baker transferred to the Southern Branch from the University of Southern

California in 1926, shortly after the Branch had been granted the privilege of offering a four-year degree. She transferred “mainly because it was cheaper…I had heard of the Southern Branch and that I could go there for low tuition, which was terribly important, and they had the home ec course.” 49 Eugene Conser, when asked about his choice of institution—Southern Branch over

USC and other private colleges—explained “in those days, at least, we didn’t consider other universities. I’d known where I was going to go, and here I was. I was living just a few blocks north of the campus, Southern Branch, and I wanted no part of USC…it was a privately endowed

48 University of California. Office of the Registrar: Statistics, Fall 1919-1969 (University Archives Reference: 8 Volumes); UCLA Office of Analysis and Information Management, “Geographic location of new undergrads at time of admission, Fall 2014,” http://www.aim.ucla.edu/tables/geographic_origin.aspx . Figures for Los Angeles County include students from City of Los Angeles schools, a distinction made in the 1920s data but not in the 2014 data. With regard to the 2014 statistics, 35 percent of new students come from Los Angeles County, but only 28 percent of new freshmen, while 55 percent of transfer students come from Los Angeles County. 49 Blanche Noble Baker, “UCLA Student Leaders: Blanche Noble Baker.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1989 by David Gist. Collection 300/361. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 42.

200 school still, and the tuition involved I would not choose to pay…there was no animosity about it.

It [USC] was just—It was just a school on the other side of town.” 50 Cyril Nigg, who enrolled as a freshman at the Southern Branch in 1923, said the campus’s location was key to his decision:

“It was right close to home,” Nigg recalled. “I could live at home. I could take the streetcar to school. This was so much better, in my family’s opinion, than going off to school and being away and not knowing what. Being close to home was the key factor, the main factor.” 51 John

Jackson said he “might have gone to USC…but it was out of the question financially. Maybe I would have gotten a track scholarship, but it still wouldn’t have been enough, because I was from a family that was not overly well-to-do, and I always had to work during the summers.” 52

James Lloyd was a freshman at UCLA the first year that a fourth year of college was offered there, and he described how money was the key factor in choosing UCLA:

…I remember a story told by Phil Davis, who was a member of my class. 53 He said he had come out of his home in Utah, went over to ‘SC, found out how much it was, came over to the Southern Branch, found out there was only a $50 tuition fee and said, ‘I am going here.’ Money was the only reason, and I think that was typical…had my family been able to afford it, I would have gone to either Cal or Stanford and I would have taken a prelegal course. However, there was no great disappointment in me when my family gently informed me that there simply was not that kind of money in our family. So I was going to the Southern Branch. 54

50 Conser, 18. 51 Nigg, 16. 52 Jackson, Oral History, 8. 53 Nigg, 107. M. Philip Davis later was President of the UCLA Alumni Association and State Assemblyman representing the Westwood area. He lobbied hard to University of California President Gordon Sproul for major graduate schools such as medical, law, and engineering schools, to be created at UCLA but was refused, as Sproul did not want to divert resources from Berkeley. According to Cyril Nigg, a University of California Regent from 1955 to 1957, Davis assembled all of the Southern California assemblymen and argued in 1945, “This is the craziest thing ever. We control the vote, and yet we allow the University of California to spend far more money in Berkeley than they spend in our southern California schools. This is our money and we’re sending it all up north. We should refuse the university budget until they agree to spend as much in southern California as they are spending in Berkeley.” This gambit evidently worked, as UCLA was granted a medical school by the Regents on October 19, 1945. Governor Earl Warren signed the appropriation bill granting funds to build the school on February 19, 1946; Warren, as the story goes, by happy accident was seated next to Davis on a plane ride from Los Angeles to Sacramento and Davis pitched him successfully on the idea. Hamilton and Jackson, 114. 54 Lloyd, 36-37. College students were apparently very price sensitive in these years. The Los Angeles Times reported on May 26, 1918, that tuition fees at USC were $50 per semester, $100 per year, which President Bovard considered “extremely low in comparison with tuition charged elsewhere.”

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As in Lloyd’s case, the Southern Branch was not an immediate first choice for many prospective Los Angeles collegians. As mentioned above, in the first years at the Southern

Branch, students who completed this two-year course were expected to then transfer to a full university, preferably the main University campus in Berkeley. Howard Carpenter recalled that when he began his studies at the Southern Branch in 1923, “the master plan was going to be that

I would go there for two years and probably go to [University of California at] Berkeley…the

Southern Branch was kind of a nonentity…it was a stepping stone.” 55 This was in the early and mid-1920s. By the late 1930s, UCLA had gained a great deal of prestige among local applicants.

John D. Roberts, who graduated from Los Angeles High School in 1936, explained his decision to attend UCLA:

[It] was handy; it was inexpensive [compared to Caltech.] Still, I had to work a lot to earn money that I needed even to go there…I mowed lawns, delivered papers, did housework, and worked at Van De Kamp Bakery as a salesman…UCLA in that period was ideal for me. At first they were very much under the thumb of Berkeley. And Berkeley was not happy about seeing UCLA’s influence expand. And the one thing they wanted to preserve for themselves was graduate work. Yet, at the same time, there wasn’t much in the way of universities in Southern California and a lot of need for a great one. I commuted; it was 12 miles or so each way. UCLA had a mix of faculty; some who were quite old and not very good, but a few very young people who were extremely good, and had sort of been hired on the promise that, well, things are going to change and we’re going to have a graduate school. 56

Roberts’ mother had wanted him to go to Caltech but he was worried about the tough academic standards, especially in math, and tuition was $200 per year. “And no women,” he pointed out, “I just couldn’t bring myself to come over [to Caltech.] 57

55 Howard Carpenter, “UCLA Student Leaders: Howard Carpenter.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1989 by David Gist. Collection 300/335. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 4. 56 Roberts, 8-9. 57 Ibid., 8.

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Southern Branch students recalled later a coziness and intimacy lost in the transition to a university. As Evelyn Woodruff Field recalled, “we weren’t deluged. Right now anybody who goes to UCLA is simply overwhelmed by the numbers, so I think one of the advantages of being in a starting college was the size.” 58 Ralph Bunche, who graduated from UCLA in 1927, wrote decades later,

I spent a little time and earned much needed cash trimming the ivy on the old campus buildings, and so I had a very special interest in it and remember it perhaps more vividly than some of my contemporaries at the University. Our student body was much smaller in those days, and it almost seemed as though all of us knew each other, though of course that was not actually the case. But we students were closely knit in rather cramped quarters because the area of the campus was limited. We came to know many of the professors very well, had a remarkable degree of freedom to them, and for that matter, to top administrative officials as well, from the Provost and the Dean on down the line. 59

Ralph Bunche was one of many undergraduate students who worked as a teaching assistant (a Reader in Political Science) or researcher in positions that would today be reserved almost exclusively for graduate students. A decade after Bunche graduated, John D. Roberts served as a teaching assistant in various chemistry courses, and pointed out that “because the

UCLA professors of that time didn’t have any graduate students, they took in just about anybody who was interested.” 60

During UCLA’s first decade and more, undergraduates had remarkable opportunities to perform graduate level work, and professors were closer to their undergraduates than was typical at mature research universities. James LuValle explained that “at UCLA at that time, you could go to work and do research for the profs by the time you were a sophomore. You became friends with your professors. You talked over your problems with them. They knew what you wanted to

58 Field, 7. 59 Letter from Ralph Bunche to Ronald W Hosie, editor of the Daily Bruin , April 21, 1966. 60 Roberts, 10. Roberts found out later on that one of his research assignments upon returning to UCLA as a graduate and contract researcher in the early 1940s was to conduct experiments in the basement of the Chemistry Building (adjacent to Royce Hall on the main quad) that led to the perfection and production of napalm. He had no idea at the time what the secret project was about.

203 do, what you were interested in.” 61 When LuValle applied for graduate schools, he did not even consider Caltech, though it had long been his desire to go there. No matter: as LuValle recalls,

“Bill Young and [William M.] Whyburn in math—and I don’t know who the other chap was, but perhaps it was [Vern] Knudsen—they took it upon themselves to go over to Caltech and talk to

Linus Pauling, and I was admitted to Caltech.” 62

Community colleges were in their infancies, and during this time struggled to compete with the established four-year colleges for students. Students at these new junior colleges, as they were then known, were critical of the lack of a collegiate lifestyle. Beatrice Haig, for example, graduated from Glendale Union High School in 1927, but chose to attend UCLA rather than the new junior college that opened in Glendale the next fall semester; as mentioned earlier, she was annoyed that the new junior campus shared a campus with her high school. 63

Nevertheless, junior colleges became very popular destinations for many college students during the 1920s and 1930s, overtaking four-year colleges in size of enrollments, as shown in Table 20 below.

Table 20: Enrollments in California Public Institutions of Higher Education, 1920-1940 64

Year Total University of California State Junior Colleges California Colleges

1920 18,850 13,860 2,721 2,269 1925 34,059 19,036 8,722 6,301 1930 56,454 19,723 9,770 26,961 1935 41,358 23,539 8,131 41,358 1940 86,357 29,423 11,874 86,357

61 LuValle, 15. 62 Ibid. Pauling won the 1954 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Young, Whyburn, and Knudsen were all among the leading scholars in their fields: chemistry, math, and acoustical physics, respectively. 63 Haig, 8. 64 Douglass, The California Idea of Higher Education , 358.

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Student Life and College Culture

UCLA in its first years quickly developed a student life similar to other liberal arts colleges or universities, following the paths taken by other normal schools. Christine Ogren notes, "during the 1920s normal schools achieved the status of colleges and also began to adopt the institutional procedures and forms of social life practiced in the colleges." 65 UCLA's privileged position as the first (and only) public university in Los Angeles quickened and intensified its institutional transformation. What had been the domain solely of private colleges in Los Angeles now was available to students attending a state school. The distant romance of

Berkeley lost much of its sparkle, as UCLA provided a viable local option. Florence Wittenberg captured the local enthusiasm for UCLA:

In Beverly Hills, there wasn’t too much talk of going to college, no. I started early—I mentioned my brother because I was determined to take the courses and get the grades to get into college because I loved his college life. You’d see his friends coming to our house—he belonged to a fraternity—and the football games were thrilling. This was a life! I just had to go to college, that’s all. 66

As mentioned in the chapter on college films, prospective students prized college life such as it was described in novels and shown on film, and were disappointed if they did not find it at their chosen college. UCLA’s first class started up a campus newspaper, replacing the old

Normal School edition, produced a yearbook, and opened a cooperative store selling university- branded goods. UCLA’s student leaders worked hard to develop new traditions and customs for the campus; one of the first editors of The Daily Bruin , Richard Goldstone, explained, “One of the most exciting things about it was that there were no traditions. We would sit in the Bruin office and invent traditions, and then we would put a thing in the Bruin saying, ‘the following tradition will go into effect as of tomorrow.’ For example, a freshman was not allowed to step

65 Christine Ogren, "Where Coeds Were Coeducated: Normal Schools in Wisconsin, 1870-1920," History of Education Quarterly 35 (Spring 1995): 1-26, 4. 66 Wittenberg, 19.

205 on the seal in the library.” 67 UCLA’s case clearly illustrates the shift in student culture away from one established by the institution (academic class identification as freshmen or sophomores) to one built by themselves based on extra-curricular activities and social organizations—fraternities and sororities in particular. This shift had taken fifty years to occur on other campuses; this compressed transformation resulted in UCLA's achieving a major college's range of student activities and organizations within its first decade.

After liberal arts classes were offered along with a strict teachers’ curriculum, the school newspaper encouraged the creation of “…traditions and rituals for creating student loyalty and a sense of group affiliation.” 68 At first, these traditions included the hazing of freshmen, distinctive academic class dress, and privileges for upperclassmen; however, by 1925, hazing was abolished and traditions based on academic class fizzled, replaced with Greek fraternities and sororities, and other campus organizations such as the YMCA and religious organizations like the Newman Club, which catered to Catholic students. 69

Student life at UCLA quickly focused on a peer social structure “based on association and prominence,” and mostly located in fraternities and sororities. Greek organizations served a critical student need—housing—especially following the move to Westwood. Dean McHenry commented that Greek organizations “provided housing in a university that had very little tradition for providing housing. Regent Dickson regarded university housing as socialism. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration…it [university housing] was objected to at Berkeley too.

67 Richard Goldstone, “UCLA Student Leaders: Richard Goldstone.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1991, 1992 by Dale Trelevan. Collection 300/369. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 19. 68 The UCLA student newspaper was named The Cub Californian , the Daily Grizzly , and other names before the staff settled on The Daily Bruin in the late twenties. 69 Nigg, 11.

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They [fraternities and sororities] did provide housing. They had national and other funds available, and they built houses out there, and it helped.” 70

Greek organizations became popular early at the Vermont campus: in 1922 the first inter- fraternity council was convened, in 1923, the first fraternity and sorority became nationally affiliated, and in the following year was the first all-fraternity and sorority dance. By 1927, the editor of the student newspaper complained, “a man or woman who doesn’t rate in the select group that hangs out in Millspaugh Hall between classes has no chance of being one of the popular set on campus. This tradition is formed unconsciously but it is about the strongest we have.” 71 Certainly it was difficult for a non-White student to become one of the “popular set,” and this was in part due to virulent discrimination practiced by Greek organizations. Dean

McHenry, the first “non-org” or non-organization man to become UCLA's student body president stated, “I always objected to fraternities and sororities of that era because of the discrimination. Not one…admitted a Jew. So Beta Zeta Tau and others became Jewish fraternities…no one in my time admitted blacks. There were very few Mexican Americans around and so on.” 72 McHenry's memory was fairly accurate regarding the racial composition of the student body of his times, according to various records below.

UCLA's Students of Color in the 1920s and 1930s

The student population of UCLA was overwhelmingly White in its early years. UCLA's

Recorder's Office maintained statistics on race and national origin off and on in the 1930s; some general findings are set forth in Table 21 below. 73

70 McHenry, 132. 71 Fass, 415. 72 McHenry, 133. 73 University of California. Office of the Registrar: Statistics, Fall 1919-1969 . (University Archives Reference: 8 Volumes).

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Table 21: Enrollments of Students of Color at UCLA, 1933-1940 74

Year Total Negro % of Students of Races % of Enrollment Students Negro other than Negro Students (Undergraduate Students (but not Foreign) of other and Graduate) Races 1933 6,927 26 0.4 108 1.6 1934 6,863 32 0.5 93 1.4 1935 7,214 37 0.5 99 1.4 1936 7,807 41 0.5 157 2.0 1937 8,087 58 0.7 145 1.8 1938 8,963 75 0.8 186 2.1 1939 9,762 65 0.7 218 2.2 1940 10,112 91 0.9 264 2.6

It is unclear by what method the Recorder's Office gathered the statistics: in those years, UCLA required students to fill out biographical cards (which are still kept confidential, special permission being required to review them), which are most likely the sources of the data. The language of racial description has changed over time, and these old reports employ words and labels hurtful to modern eyes—referring to people as yellow, red, brown, or Negro. 75 In these

1930s reports, Filipino/a students, who with only a rare exception listed their birthplaces as the

Philippine Islands, were listed as "brown"; the few Mexican students (counting about a dozen each year), who overwhelmingly listed their birthplaces as towns and cities in Mexico, were listed as "White." 76 The students in the "races other than Negro" category were Japanese

American students for the most part, born in California or Washington State, although there were a few Chinese and Korean students, and even one Assyrian (who was not counted as a foreign student, but gave his race as Assyrian.) As Shirley Jennifer Lim has reported, “most of the

Asian/Pacific American students in American colleges and universities [prior to World War II]

74 University of California. Office of the Registrar: Statistics, Fall 1919-1969 . 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid.

208 were Japanese Americans: in 1941, 2,500 students were Japanese or Japanese American and only

823 were Chinese or Chinese American.” 77

White students dominated leadership positions, monopolized organized social activities, and were (according to their later reminisces) mainly unaware of students of color. 78 Yet interracial socializing occurred among groups such as the Young Men’s and Women’s Christian

Associations (“YMCA” and “YWCA” respectively) and the Cosmopolitan Club. Considering the YMCA and YWCA is interesting because it allows historical views into religion among students of public universities in the beginning of the twentieth century. 79 Most Southern

California colleges and universities had large YMCA and YWCA chapters, including a YWCA chapter at the State Normal School of Los Angeles that was founded in 1895, two dozen years before UCLA opened. These groups offered significant support to students in a period when official student affairs offices were still threadbare. At the University of Southern California’s

YMCA chapter, the offices contained “typewriters, telephone service, mail service, board, room, employment bureau, library, reading room, lounging room, piano, and book exchange.” 80 In the

1923-24 school year, the USC YMCA reported assisting 400 students in finding room and board.” 81 These popular intercollegiate organizations contributed to removing religion from classrooms by providing it a place off campus for such discussions.

Flipping through UCLA yearbooks from these years and photographs of these specific student organizations (among others) reveals crossings of what seemed—according to various

77 Lim, 26. 78 Ibid. 79 David P. Setran, “Student Religious Life in the ‘Era of Secularization:’ The Intercollegiate YMCA, 1877-1940,” Perspectives on the History of Higher Education 21 (2001): 8-11. 80 Ed Rodeo , University of Southern California, 1925. 81 Ibid.

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White student leaders--impermeable racial boundaries. 82 Students of color formed their own organizations, seeking to create a vibrant student life of their own alongside the White student world. Chi Alpha Delta, a Japanese American sorority founded in 1929, was the first Greek organization for students of color at UCLA’s new Westwood campus. It must be noted that yearbooks are flawed historical sources in general, and specifically for this study, as the Nisei

Bruin Club, an organization for Japanese American male students, was never pictured or mentioned in a yearbook, yet they certainly existed, as their members and activities are referenced in Chi Alpha Delta’s archives. 83 While there do not appear to have been any African

American sororities on the Westwood campus, historian Paula J. Giddings reports that Delta

Sigma Theta, an African American sorority, formed an alumni chapter in 1928. 84 However, there is no record of their activities at Westwood, and Lim theorizes that perhaps Delta Sigma Theta, which according to her existed along with another African American sorority, Alpha Kappa

Alpha, in 1926, did not make the move to Westwood because of racially restrictive covenants in the new village or because they were graduates and did not need to be near to the new campus. 85

Filipino students (including World War I veterans) formed a student organization in the mid- twenties, remaining active into the next decade. Also, in 1923, the Upsilon Chapter of Kappa

Alpha Psi, a black fraternity founded in 1911 at the University of Indiana, was chartered at early

UCLA. If the Upsilon Chapter’s experiences were similar to the Indiana founders, then they

82 Southern Branch 1923-24 Yearbook (Los Angeles, 1925). Exceptions such as Ralph Bunche’s and Emil Menzen’s, (Filipino) membership in the pre-Legal Society also exist. 83 Lim, 199. 84 Ibid., 200. 85 Ibid.

210 must have had hard times. At Indiana, the nine founders went unrecognized by the university, were denied space for meetings, and had difficulty finding a house for the chapter. 86

Two of the founding members of the Upsilon Chapter, Jefferson “Jeff” Brown, and Leon

Whittaker were also active in interracial groups such as the Circle “C” Society and the

Cosmopolitan Club. The Cosmopolitan Club had as its purpose brotherhood and good fellowship among all races: it had chapters across the nation, including one at the University of

Southern California. At its peak in the mid-twenties, the Club had about fifty members at early

UCLA; Kazuo Kawaii, a Japanese American, was president; Leon Whittaker, the secretary was

African American; and Justo Leano, a Filipino student, was the treasurer. Kazuo Kawaii was also Committee Chairman for Foreign Students in the YMCA. 87 Dean McHenry, recalled, “We were discussing even then race relations…the Y was a liberalizing influence on me.” 88 An informal group that met in the mid-1920s centered on Marjorie Rosenfeld Leonard, Etta Gordon,

Bob Newhouse, and Ralph Bunche, and is referenced in a letter from Leonard to Ralph Bunche two decades later. This letter anticipated the civil rights movement that came decades later:

Can you remember how, as students, a group of us sat before the fireplace all night long as you talked about the way in which you believed racial prejudices could be broken down? I felt that I wanted you to know what your success means at least to one other person. There is still such a long road ahead before the words ‘prejudice’ and ‘discrimination’ can become obsolete! But to know that one individual can alone achieve so much gives cause to be hopeful. 89

White students interviewed as elderly adults do not mention many specific examples of racism on campus, but do confirm the solid existence of social segregation based on race,

86 André McKenzie, “In the Beginning” in African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision , ed. Tamara L. Brown, Gregory S. Parks, and Clarenda Phillips. (Lexington, KY: The University of Kentucky Press, 2005). 87 McHenry, 133. 88 Ibid. 89 Letter from Marjorie Rosenfeld Leonard to Ralph Bunche, July 17, 1949. Ralph J. Bunche Papers (Collection 2051). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

211 especially with regard to fraternities and sororities. James Lloyd, who graduated in 1928, remembered, “There were very few blacks on campus. One of them, of course was Ralph

Bunche. Ralph Bunche—you can almost say he was loved by everybody. He was that kind of a person. You have to think that when there were so few blacks, we were reassuring ourselves that we weren’t prejudiced by being able to like a black and respect him.” 90 Not all of Lloyd's contemporaries agreed, it seems. Other students were openly racist, and Bunche was not universally admired. A White alumnus, Andrew Lansing, wrote to Bunche in 1936 regarding a particular incident:

I was a freshman at the University of California at Los Angeles, the time was September 1926, and the place was Poly-Sci 1A. A beefy red-necked athlete proudly sporting a pledge-pin grunted in my ear, “Hear this is a tough prof, and a ‘nigger-lover’ besides. Yup, has a nigger for a reader…a week later, this ‘reader’ pinch-hitted for the hour— Ralph Bunche in one hour did more to break down the barbarous prejudices of that group of freshmen than all of the pamphlets ever written by the [Communist] Party. 91

Race was not literally a Black and White issue on campus, and students could be ambivalent about racial identification and identity. James LuValle, for example, was certainly considered a student of color, being referred to as Negro in contemporary sources, yet one of his grandmothers was White, and possibly his father, who he hardly knew, and his mother was of mixed race. The White majority had the power to label, the power to name a student’s race. Even as a respected, brilliant, and popular student, LuValle felt the pressure of representing his “race” as others defined it, and was ambivalent about it. LuValle recalled:

Students used to have a dance on the weekends at the Elks Hall, or something. Black students went down and weren’t admitted…Provost Moore asked me to see what I could do about it. I actually did some things about it. It took me about a month and a half and it

90 James Lloyd, “UCLA Student Leaders: James Lloyd.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1991 by David Gist. Collection 300/348. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 61. 91 Letter to Ralph Bunche, New Masses Magazine , New York City, from Andrew Lansing, November 20, 1936. Ralph J. Bunche Papers (Collection 2051). Department of Special Collections, Charles E. Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

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was stopped: they were admitted. But during this time, unfortunately, some of the black students on campus complained to [Provost Moore] that they didn’t want me to represent them because I never spent any time with them. I didn’t, because I spent time with my friends (LuValle’s emphasis), but I did take care of this problem so they were admitted from that time on. 92

This story reveals a weakness of oral histories as sources: LuValle ended up a famous chemist and a UCLA hero, with a campus area now named after him, so he had his history recorded and it is readily available in the university archives. As for the Black students who opposed

LuValle’s representing them, the author has not found a record of their complaint or its reasoning, so LuValle’s word is all we have on it thus far.

Evolution of Student Politics at UCLA from the 1920s to the 1930s

Since UCLA opened as the Southern Branch, students had been both aware of and involved with communist and socialist organizations. Eugene Conser moved to California in

1922, and on his meandering voyage west from Minnesota ran low on money and took a job at a lumber camp west of Portland, Oregon. He recalled, “It was in the lumbering camp where I first encountered the world as it is. There were rough characters. We’d sit around the campfire at night. These were all older men…sitting around the campfire, they would all be talking politics.

They were members of the IWW, the Industrial Workers of the World. They were, in a sense, early communists. And they would sit around the campfire and talk about how they were going to take over the country. That was my first exposure to that. I was frightened…of course, it was very shocking to me.” 93

Through the late twenties and into the early thirties, students nationally and at UCLA were as a whole politically conservative; the majority favored Republicans for national office,

92 LuValle, 27, 30. LuValle listed his friends as being from various groups: the track team (Jim Miller, Bob Young, Ray Vejar, and Sinclair Lott); the Religious Conference and Student Government (Dick Rogan, Maury Grossman, John Burnside, Tom Lambert, Frank Wilkinson, Phyllis Edwards, Betty Geary); Chemistry students (Glenn Seaborg, Saul Weinstein, Darryl Osborne, Bobby Nye, and Dorothy Jackson). 93 Conser, 18.

213 even supporting Herbert Hoover in 1932 against Franklin Roosevelt. Dean McHenry explained,

“We were in most cases, a long way from being able to vote and to have any great influence…students hadn’t yet picked up the notion that they could picket or boycott classes.

And the preoccupation from about 1930 on was ‘where the hell am I going to get a job?’” 94

While early UCLA was struggling and insignificant, new professors were welcomed without question of their political leanings. An economics professor, Ordean Rockney, visiting from Cambridge was widely known as a socialist. He often delivered a lecture described as “a pretty good tirade on the American system.” 95 In this lecture, according to a student’s memory, he would ask his class, “Why would this man who is president of the organization be entitled to all these fringe benefits? Why does he deserve such a big salary? Why does he deserve all the brownie points of vacation with pay in Europe or something over and above the norm?” Porter

Hendricks, who remembered this “tirade,” was staunchly conservative yet still believed his professor “was just wonderful. [A] very fair man, you know. One of the very best.” 96

Not all professors were like-minded. Education Professor Frederick Woellner distrusted unfettered discourse, going so far as to state in 1934, “We no longer believe in free speech. We believe in responsible speech.” 97 Woellner 98 taught the Americanization courses for education students and according to Porter Hendricks, had “certain liaisons with the [Los Angeles] Police

Department and the FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)…there were two FBI men on the campus as students in plain clothes, student clothes, etc…they advised the police department as

94 McHenry, 27. 95 L. Porter Hendricks, “UCLA Student Leaders: L. Porter Hendricks.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1991 by Dale Trevelan. Collection 300/374. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 67. 96 Ibid. 97 Roger Cohen, When the Old Left was Young: Student Radicals and America’s First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 98. 98 Ann Sumner, who attended UCLA from 1922 to 1926, said, “Sometimes a professor can be too popular, and I think in many ways Woellner can be too popular. He was in a department that was criticized greatly—education— and he told many jokes. He was very lightweight from the professor’s standpoint.” Sumner, Oral History 300/138.

214 well as the FBI.” 99 Hendricks recalled working closely with Professor Woellner to find communists on campus. In 1933, Woellner asked Hendricks to write a term paper on communism at UCLA; Hendricks remembered being told, “I don’t give a damn whether you come to class anymore this semester, but you write that paper.” 100 Hendricks began his research, basing it on rumor, based upon what people said: ‘you know so-and-so is very liberal’, or ‘you know that so-and-so is pink…because they have taken an active position in student body meetings and are always pushing the liberal approach.” 101 After eight weeks of research,

Hendricks turned in the paper, having received an “A”: he found “five or six dyed-in-the-wool communists among the UCLA students, and about 40, maybe 50 hangers-on, liberals who would get up and take part in rallies…I don’t know what he did with [the report], whether he turned it over to the police department or FBI or what, but this was the best we could find—that as far as we knew, there were about five [communists.] 102

With his campus espionage and police partnerships, Professor Woellner was only following the lead of UCLA’s administration in the early thirties. Director Ernest Moore became more and more concerned with left-wing activity in the early thirties. 103 Professor Waldermar

Westergaard offered this illustration:

When Dr. Moore had his office in [Powell] library, facing the quad, then he could hear students. On one of those occasions he could hear students outside talking, in this case mentioning the name of Karl Marx, and he took a look to see who this student was. Then he dashed out and asked them, ‘Did I hear someone mention Karl Marx?’ One of the men rather shyly admitted that he had, and so [Moore] waved his arms at them and said, ‘Disperse, disperse!’ 104

99 Hendricks, 54. 100 Ibid. 101 Ibid., 57. 102 Ibid., 55. 103 Hamilton and Jackson , 77. 104 Westergaard, 113.

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One time, Moore inserted a student spy into philosophy professor Donald Platt’s class to check on “whether the professor showed tendencies toward Communism.” 105 One student recollected Moore speaking of radical activity, “He’d be…damning the Communist party, damning the pinkos, damning the IWWs, and so on… and he said, “This is a scourge that we’re going to have to face, and you might as well know how I feel about it. We’ve got to keep our eyes open. This is a Russian influence.” 106 Moore grew nervous at the liberal, even radical image UCLA might be projecting to the city; many in Los Angeles had begun to refer to it as

“the little red schoolhouse” for this reason. 107 A professor recalled, “I think Moore really believed that there was a strong Communist presence [at UCLA.] There were Communists there, but no more than there were in any university campus over the country. But of course, by the time the episode was over, our campus was advertised as being more strongly penetrated with

Communism than any other.” 108

In 1934, Moore met with the California State Police and the Los Angeles Police

Department regarding socialist and communist activities on campus, even asking them to arrest a student who one of his informants claimed was communist.109 The police provided Moore with intelligence reports on subversive students; one report concerned Celeste Strack, a former "A' student and champion debater at the University of Southern California, who was expelled after her sophomore year for radical political activities. 110 Moore met with Strack in his office shortly after she enrolled at UCLA in 1934—the meeting became ugly, she accused him of cowardice

105 Ibid., 112. 106 Hendricks, 81. 107 Ibid., 67. 108 Westergaard, 111. 109 Cohen, When the Old Left was Youn g, 118. 110 Southern California Library for Social Studies and Research. "Celeste Strack Kaplan Papers, 1931-1996." Index to Papers available at Online Archive of California, http://findaid.oac.cdlib.org/findaid/ark:/13030/tf029000tj

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for not supporting free speech on campus, he called her a traitor for espousing socialist beliefs. 111

On October 29, 1934, Moore expelled Strack and four other students for organizing radical

activities. The five were members of a Scholarship Board that operated a “student-controlled

forum for political and social issues.” 112 This forum, Moore believed, was a front for the

Communist Party. In a letter dated October 19, 1934, Moore wrote his friend Ezequiel Chávez, a lawyer from Mexico City and rector at the University Nacional de México, commiserating with him over student radicalism in both countries:

How is this, our life, with you? I read in the Los Angeles Times this morning about students shooting at the police in the City of México and was grieved, as I know you were. There is an interesting article in the last Yale Review on what students in South America are doing. You may care to look it up. It seems to picture a condition of affairs which is wrong and unpromising. The National Students League, a communistic organization in the United States, largely made up of Russian Jews, is trying to persuade our American students to do the same thing. And yet it has not succeeded and will not succeed. 113

111 Cohen, When the Old Left was Young, 120. 112 Hamilton and Jackson, 78. The students were John Burnside, President of the student body (UCLA Associated Students); Thomas Lambert, chairman of the Men’s Board; Sid Zagri, chairman of the Forensics Board; Mendel Lieberman, chairman of the Scholarship Board; and Celeste Strack, who had recently transferred from USC. According to Hamilton and Jackson, later in life Burnside was a career officer in the U.S. Air Force, retiring as a full colonel; Lambert was a law professor and editor of the national lawyers’ news magazine; Szagri was a Teamsters’ Union attorney, Lieberman worked for the California State Bar; and Strack “continued her left-wing activities in California, New York City, and in Cuba.” It is evident these UCLA historians, writing in 1969, blame these events mostly on Strack, a recent transfer from USC. They fail to mention she graduated from UCLA with a bachelor's degree and in the 1950s received a Master's degree in social work from UCLA. 113 Ernest Carroll Moore letter to Ezequiel Chávez, October 19, 1934. Ernest Carroll Moore Papers, University of California, Los Angeles, Department of Special Collections. Moore had a forty year-long correspondence with Chávez, from 1906 to 1947, and added tender and lighthearted comments to his letters, such as when he boasted in his November 23, 1919 letter—during the first semester the Southern Branch was in operation—that “there are 1,250 students, with 600 little people in addition to that number in the training school,” referring to the schoolchildren in the elementary school that had been attached to the Normal School for decades already (and which is still operating on campus as the UCLA Lab School. Yet Moore and other conservatives were in a frightened and sour mood in the fall of 1934, as Upton Sinclair with his EPIC campaign (End Poverty in California) seemingly threatening a socialist takeover. Moore alludes to this in his October 19, 1934 letter: “We are hard hit by the depression in the United States and there are false prophets among us…We are having a campaign for a Governor of California this year that is crucial and which interests us all very much.” Moore’s fearful attitude in 1934 was a sharp turn from his hopes for Franklin Roosevelt’s success two years before, he wrote Chávez on November 9, 1932 that the election meant that “the bankers cannot sit in their caves and sulk in the presence of such an order from the people. We shall see what we shall see. New days are afoot in the United States.” By November 1934, Moore was panicking about “communistic Russian Jews” and their plots.

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Moore’s suspensions of these students (several of whom happened to be Jewish, fitting neatly into Moore’s views as expressed to Chávez) wreaked havoc on campus. On October 30,

1934, UCLA was rocked by brawls between on one side students sympathetic to those expelled and on the other side university police, fraternity members, and UCLA athletes. 114 With 3,000 students attending, it was the largest spontaneous political rally in UCLA history up to that point. 115 The athletes were responding to Dr. Moore’s call that UCLA ‘purge itself of radical tendencies.’ They formed the backbone of a quickly formed student group called the UCLA

Americans “organized with the avowed intention of ridding the campus of Communism. This group held several secret meetings, elected officers and distributed tiny American flags to students and faculty.” 116 A mass demonstration scheduled for ten o’clock in the morning in front of Powell Library was switched at the last moment to in front of Royce Hall, across the quad so that the police could not push through the crowd to arrest the speaker. When a police officer almost reached the speaker, “a flying tackle by one of the students landed him in the bushes.” 117

Apparently, the UCLA Americans helped to trigger the brawl; as Strack scoffed, “the athletes were at the bottom of it, of course: it has become an almost predictable development in college struggles that the athletes will be on the side of administration and reaction.” 118 Professor Flora

Scott remembered, “We were in the Botany Building. We suddenly heard the screaming of about a dozen motorcycles with the cops with their six-shooters on them. That was Ernest Carroll

114 Los Angeles Times , October 31, 1934. 115 Cohen, When the Old Left was Youn g, 212. 116 Ibid. 117 Celeste Strack, Student Review 4(3) (March 1935), 17-18. 118 Ibid. The other entities backing Dr. Moore and the UCLA Americans were the American Legion, the Daughters of the American Revolution, and the Better America Foundation. The American Legion was particularly incensed by the UCLA student government’s decision to stop dividing the ticket sale proceeds from the Armistice Day football game with the Legion and with its resolution to send a pacifist speaker to a Legion meeting rather than the customary ROTC honor guard.

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Moore’s doing. We thought it was just asinine.” 119 President Sproul, who conducted his own investigation in Los Angeles, and quickly cleared the students of any charges, save for

“insubordination…pursuing a course of action in connection with a campaign for a student- controlled forum, contrary to the instructions of the Provost,” and promptly reinstated their standing on campus. 120 Sproul was highly sympathetic with Moore, having exchanged letters with him throughout 1934 regarding the perils of communism 121 , but now simply wanted the matter ended so that negative press coverage of the university would end.

The embarrassing 1934 Red Scare gave the University administration, Regents, and a new, powerful faculty the pretext to remove Provost Moore, who was not considered qualified to lead a full university that was developing graduate programs. UCLA Professor Waldermar

Westergaard explained:

I always felt that Ernest Carroll Moore was not to be permitted to have too much power on the campus. They kept very close hold of Moore during part of his administration. Perhaps for good reasons because, after all, he’d been brought up in a normal school environment. He’d been at Harvard and Yale for lectureships, to be sure, but he had been school superintendent for a while, and also head of the Normal School, and that was not exactly the sort of thing that would make him intimate with academic affairs on the university level. 122

The arrival of graduate coursework, coupled with the recent Red Scare and all of the accompanying bad publicity, led University of California Robert Gordon Sproul to take action, consulting with a small number of UCLA professors on whether to fire Moore. Westergaard argued that Moore should not be fired but rather transferred to a lecturer position in the history of education and that another provost be found for UCLA. 123 As described above, Westergaard and other professors had already been working behind the scenes with Regent Dickson to secure

119 Scott, 36. 120 Hamilton and Jackson, 79. 121 Cohen, When the Old Left was Youn g, 126. 122 Westergaard, 95. 123 Ibid., 116.

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graduate education for UCLA. Their meeting with Sproul “was the same sort of informal

meeting that we had with him all along and while Dickson had worked well with [Moore],

Dickson had come to realize that Moore did not have enough of the confidence of the faculty

members to justify his staying on.” 124 Within a few years of receiving the right to teach graduate

courses, UCLA’s faculty had grown powerful, even mighty enough to topple UCLA’s founding

leader in this quiet coup d’etat .125126

The Great Depression and Its Impact on UCLA and its Students

In October 1929, the stock market crashed, and the Great Depression followed.

Institutions bled enrollment. Higher education did not seem to offer a certain economic reward any longer. The job market was bleak: "Law school graduates taught elementary school.

Department stores were hiring college graduates as sales clerks. Some recent graduates, who were lucky enough to find funds to scrape along, went to graduate school rather than face the jobless business world." 127 Students’ faith in progress and a prosperous future was terribly

weakened. About the pre-Depression years, Eleanor Lloyd Dees sighed: "we just took it for

124 Ibid. 125 Ibid. 126 Ernest Carroll Moore comes across in many accounts of UCLA in the 1930s as a kind of stock villain, the old- fashioned Normal School schoolmaster left behind by the modern new university, and it did not help that, in the words of one student, Moore could come across as “a very ugly man. He had a very ugly chin and kind of a sourpuss expression as though he had just drank bitter tea or something.” Lloyd, 89. Yet Moore’s personal life was full of pain while he headed UCLA, especially in the early years, as his wife Dorothea was a physical invalid and could hardly leave their house, dying in 1942, and Moore took good care of her.

Dean McHenry summed up how many students (and people in general) felt about Moore, and if we take any lessons from history, perhaps as academics we might try to keep a sense of fun in our daily work. McHenry said of Moore, “I think he was a cold fish who really wanted to belong. I remember the day it snowed in 1932—what a picture in our minds!—Well, everybody, including the president of the student body, gathered in the main quad, rolled up snowballs, and threw them on occasion. Dr. Moore walked across from Royce Hall to what is now Powell, and we all tightened our snowballs, and not one of us—he had a black hat—not one of us dared throw. Then Marvel Stockwell, who taught the big class in economics, came across, and he got ten steps and somebody said, ‘Get Stockwell!’ and we all fired at once. Then we took a giant snowball we carried up to the top floor of Royce, on that open area facing the main quad, and had ammunition up there. We had only one campus policeman then, I think, and some students were part-time policemen, and he was coming across, a very nice guy. He says, ‘You stop that. No more snowballs,’ and so on. We waited till he got directly under and pushed the big one off on him. But Dr. Moore, I think, would have appreciated having somebody knock his hat off with a snowball.” (95). 127 Lee, Campus Scene, 1900-1970 , 48.

220 granted that something good was always going to happen next year. And up until the Depression that was true." 128

In October 1932, The New York Times surveyed nineteen colleges and universities across the nation, and reported that only six institutions increased enrollments from 1931 to 1932. 129 A rapid growth in enrollments throughout the twenties, continuing even through the first years after the 1929 stock market crash, now slowed to a trickle in growth or even to outright losses. UCLA did not participate in the survey, but Berkeley did, reporting the largest increase of the nineteen.

This did not signal that Berkeley was immune from the Depression’s ill effects; rather, “at the

University of California the chief effect of the depression noted here is prolongation of the college period by students already registered and return of old students who once left.

Enrollment of new undergraduates never attending before shows a [future] tendency to decrease.

Apparently students who formerly were attracted from college by lucrative offers of lucrative positions are now continuing studies for lack of something better to do. On the other hand, students who have not yet entered college drag out high school or enter local junior colleges to save money by living at home.” 130

By 1932, the deleterious effects of the Depression also extended their reach into student consumer behavior. As one contemporary report states, "The student of 1932…has sold the flashy roadster and is buying second-hand books, and more than ever before he is asking for scholarship aid, low-priced dormitory rooms, and a chance to work his way." 131 The Daily Bruin reported much of the same effects on the UCLA scene, declaring, "Economic necessity has

128 Eleanor Lloyd Dees, "Westwood Pioneers Oral History Transcript: Eleanor Lloyd Dees." Transcript of oral history conducted in 1979-1985 by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 179. 129 New York Times , October 3, 1932. 130 Ibid. 131 Cohen, When the Old Left Was Young , 17.

221 forced thought into the life of the college student. Foolish hazing and traditional exorbitant, expensive fraternities, excessive drinking and gambling are disappearing. Serious thought on economic and political problems is increasing." 132

John D. Roberts reported that as a freshman in 1937 he worked from 7 P.M. to midnight during the week at various odd jobs, including at the Van de Kamp Bakery, and all day Saturday.

This work schedule hurt his academic efforts. In one specific example, the only section available of a critical chemistry laboratory was on Saturday morning, when Roberts worked. He went to the Chemistry Department Chair, William Conger Morgan (of whom it was said in his 1940

University of California obituary that “he never encouraged weaklings to enter the professions of chemistry and medicine”) to discuss the matter. 133 Roberts recalled saying to Morgan, “Well, look, I’ve got to get to work; I’ve got to get into another section. I can’t afford [to miss work on

Saturdays.]” Morgan said he could not switch him, to which Roberts protested that he was, after all, a chemistry major and perhaps that might allow him special consideration. Morgan replied,

“Oh, if I could get rid of twenty chemistry majors, I’d be much happier. It’s Saturday or nothing.” 134

Los Angeles' economy was hit hard by the Depression, both in number of workers unemployed and in the types of jobs that had been lost. In Los Angeles there were noticeably greater numbers of White-collar workers who had been laid off, generating tremendous status anxiety among the professional middle class in the region. 135 Southern California led the country in personal bankruptcies from 1929-1933, and in 1933, half of California's 344,000 unemployed

132 Daily Bruin , February 1, 1932. 133 University of California (System) Academic Senate, University of California: In Memoriam: William Conger Morgan, 1940, http://texts.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb367nb1mt&chunk.id=div00006&brand=calisphere&doc.view=entire_text . 134 Roberts, 10. 135 Davis, Company Men , 198-199.

222 persons lived in Los Angeles.136 In the depths of the crisis, USC pledged $50,000—its projected shared of tickets sales for the Rose Bowl Game—to the National Unemployment Emergency

Fund. 137 In the summer of 1931, a relief organization surveyed the Los Angeles economic scene.

It found that in 1,500 businesses employing 15 or more employees, a third of the workers employed back in autumn 1929 had been laid off; moreover, of the two-thirds remaining, a majority had experienced either pay cuts, time reductions, or both. According to Rowe Rader

Baldwin, who worked for the Janss Investment Company during these years, "I remember so well, just great bands of men out of work walking the streets. We had instructions from the Janss

Company that any man who came into the office and was hungry and asked for money—we gave everybody a quarter and for a quarter you could buy a doughnut and a cup of coffee." 138

When asked why it was reported by her contemporaries that during the Depression in fraternities and sororities men worked part-time jobs in order to make it through school, and women students did not need to work, Florence Wittenberg offered her opinion, “Many of the girls just went to college to meet the men to marry as well as to get a higher education. They did not have the thought then of going to college to begin a career. And even when I didn’t make my grades and was allowed to be initiated into the sorority, one of the girls asked, “Well, what are you going to do?” and I said, ‘Well, I’m coming back. I came here for an education.’ ‘You are’ they said. They were just amazed that I would come back like that…these were girls who were supported by their parents. They didn’t have to worry about any means at all.” 139 Kathryn

Messner, who attended UCLA from 1932 to 1938, worried about money incessantly:

136 Ibid. 137 New York Times , December 20, 1931. The Rose Bowl’s attendance was 75,562, and USC defeated Tulane University, 21-12. 138 Baldwin, 81. 139 Wittenberg, 59.

223

I remember my father giving me twenty-five cents a day: five cents for food, ten cents for the bus [twenty cents there and home again.] I had to walk sixteen blocks to the bus. If I was picked up by someone—and people picked you up, there was nothing to be worried about—then I’d have fifteen cents maybe for lunch. I had breakfast, and then I’d wait until six o’clock and go down to Kerckhoff Hall and figure out what I could eat that would fill me. Mostly it was a bowl of soup. In graduate school it was a cream pie. Then I would eventually go home. Sometimes I didn’t get home until two or three o’clock in the morning…My father [who was a professor himself] wouldn’t let me work and said, ‘When you complete your education, then you can work, but not until that time.’…I never had any money to buy books. In the six years I went to UCLA, I only ever bought two books. I had to get everything from the library because I didn’t have the money for it. 140

Students who wanted jobs badly were often restricted by racist hiring practices, and for students of color, particularly Japanese American students, the choice was to work for family businesses or not at all. Shizue Yoshina, a founding member of Chi Alpha Delta, explained “It’s not like I could get a job because of prejudice and so we depended on our folks for help…my dad had a company, of three department stores in Japantown. I guess my family wasn’t hurting too much, but we didn’t have a lot of extra money, we had to work every weekend, and whenever there were sales.” 141

Elizabeth Franz Ahlm, while her family was not wealthy (her father was also a UCLA professor), felt that the male students were more directly affected by the hard times, and this changed socializing behaviors. "Nobody,” she explained, "had any money, particularly the fellows, because they were really putting themselves through college quite a bit more than the girls, I think. The women were still—at least the ones I think of—being financed by their families. They [male students] honestly didn’t have money to take you on a date, so maybe you went to a movie or something, but that was the big event." 142 Ahlm recalled the straits in which

140 Messner, 539, 553. 141 Lim, 27. 142 Ahlm, Elizabeth Franz, "Westwood Pioneers Oral History Transcript: Elizabeth Franz Ahlm." Transcript of oral history conducted in 1979-1985 by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 32.

224 several of her male student friends lived in Westwood: "they slept over the grease rack [of a service station] in the little alcoves that are all gone now…I guess they had sleeping bags…and they swam and everything at the university and used all those facilities." 143

Even students from wealthy backgrounds felt the bite of the Depression, albeit in small and singular ways. Lucy Guild Toberman remembered, “…my mother owned a shoe store, Ferra

Gamma Shoe Store on Hollywood Boulevard, and they couldn’t pay their rent. So they paid us in shoes. Instead of having nice, sensible shoes to wear on campus, I would have things with high heels and flowers painted on them and fishnet coverings-- $85 shoes in the day when shoes were $8.50. And she owned a chicken dinner restaurant, so I could only entertain by taking my friends out to chicken dinners.” 144

Of course, other students could not afford even $8.50 shoes, and were not invited out to many chicken dinners. Across the nation, social activities changed to less expensive missions:

"the results were dates consisting of hiking instead of the movies and even going to the library instead of [going into] town." 145 Ann Sumner, who graduated from UCLA in 1926 and took a job working for the campus News Bureau in 1932, recalled the Depression as "rugged and rough years at the University." Sumner remembered,

[T]o our horror, they found that one young woman had been living for I don’t know how many months in the watchman's dressing room under the old bridge of the campus. She had no money, and there was water there and ample supplies. It was warm, because I think the heating system ran through there. And she made herself very comfortable for a quite a while before she was discovered. 146

143 Ibid. 144 Toberman, 74. 145 Lee, 50. 146 Sumner, 56.

225

During the Depression, students often tried to support their families as well as themselves on meager resources. Ann Sumner was reminded of this by the Dean of Women, Helen Mathewson

Laughlin in the early years of the Depression:

She [Dean Laughlin] came down one day and scolded me—just unfairly I thought. She said, 'Do you know that your little Dolores is living with three other girls? She's supporting them. One of them is her sister. They're all eating on that twenty-five dollars that you pay Dolores through [the National Youth Administration.] They haven't had anything to eat except hamburger for weeks. I want you to go the office and see that you pay that girl more.' 147

Sumner recalled, "And I did." The Dean of Women, a post that would die out nationally within a generation, was a powerful figure at early UCLA and at many other institutions in this era. 148

The Depression lasted deep into the 1930s, and Los Angeles and the rest of the country did not fully emerge from its depths until the federal government began a massive rearmament campaign in 1940 and 1941, and the economy accelerated further after the United States’ entry into World War II on December 7, 1941. 149

The Granting of Graduate Education and its Importance to UCLA

The University of California’s leaders had never supported UCLA having the right to ward graduate degrees, with Presidents Barrows and Campbell both opposed to the idea. 150

Campbell “talked about the possibility of it, but that was always in the dim and uncertain future somewhere.” 151 Edward Dickson was forced to buy books for UCLA out of his own pocket

147 The NYA was the National Youth Administration, a federal agency set up as a part of President Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal. It provided an early form of the Federal Work Study program for high school and college students. In the early 1930's the NYA paid a minimum of $25 per month to hundreds of needy students at early UCLA, who in exchange worked various jobs on campus. 148 See Carolyn Terry Bashaw, "Stalwart Women": A Historical Analysis of Deans of Women in the South (New York: Teachers College Press, 1999). 149 Leuchtenberg, The American President: Theodore Roosevelt to Bill Clinton , 218-219. 150 Dundjerski, 69. 151 Westergaard, 84.

226 because Campbell hoped a small library would slow the path to graduate education. 152 The

Regents, Dickson told Waldemar Waldegaard during one of their car rides together, “had just got tired of listening to Campbell and having him put off graduate work to an indefinite time,” and so they asked him to retire a year early. 153 The University’s new President, Robert Gordon

Sproul, was much more welcome to the idea: he “saw UCLA’s expansion as a natural evolution in a rapidly growing state.” 154 On August 8, 1933, UCLA was permitted to train students (125 maximum) for the M.A. degree, and on May 22, 1936, the Regents followed up by granting

UCLA the right to award Ph.D. degrees. Two years later, Kenneth Bailey received UCLA’s first

Ph.D. (History), and a research university was born. 155 From 1933 to 1938, UCLA established seven new graduate programs, and its graduate student enrollments rose from 125 to 538. Dean

McHenry saw a key shift occur during the 1930s:

It was a very impressive faculty…two categories that were quite marked...the people who were of national stature, who had been brought in from elsewhere, often recruited at the professor level, who were the bulwark of the university, and then there were this other category of people who were there from a teachers’ college…that is who had been hired as teachers’ college people. When I was a freshman there were probably as many of the teachers’ college people as there were of the university level people. Then, over the years, I saw that change considerably and by the time I came back in the faculty in ’39, virtually all the teachers’ college people were gone, had retired, died…it was a big shift. 156

Following World War II, with the creation of a medical school in 1947 and more professional schools and graduate programs to follow, UCLA would be quite a new and different university.

This chapter ends with the beginning of graduate education at UCLA; no longer would talented undergraduates like Jimmy LuValle, Ralph Bunche, and John D. Roberts be able to work like proto-graduate students; the faculty would move farther toward research and

152 Ibid. 153 Ibid. 154 Dundjerski, 68. 155 Centennial Record, 331-332. 156 McHenry, 26.

227 publication as the highest aim and the institution moved farther away from the Normal School origins. Ernest Carroll Moore hung on as a lecturer until 1941, but his day was done. The generation of students thrilled with a two-year college, and overjoyed with a new campus, full of pioneering pep, gave way to higher and higher academically achieving students, undergraduate and graduate, who sought a UCLA degree as a path to personal prestige. The Golden Age of the

1950s and 1960s was just around the bend.

228

Chapter 9: The Once and Future Majority: Women Students at UCLA, 1919-1941.

In 1929, English journalist Alfred Patrick Perry visited USC and compared it with

Oxford and Cambridge, commenting favorably on USC’s “magnificent buildings, airy, spacious, and new,” but relaying with great shock the “novelty” of a “drove of beautiful young women. ‘Are they making a movie here?’ [Perry] asked. ‘No’ replied his guide,

‘these are undergraduates.’ And they were walking about as if the place belonged to them as much as the men! My Oxford hair bristled.” While Perry was discussing USC, he would have observed the same scene across town in Westwood, yet at UCLA women comprised the majority of the students. Perry’s Oxford hair might have burst into flame at the sight. 1

Since the 1970s, women have comprised the majority of college students in the

United States. This fact, though hardly a new development, is regularly reported in the popular press. 2 In 2012, 57 percent of undergraduates and 59 percent of graduate students were women. 3 In the Fall quarter of 2014, women comprised 56 percent of

UCLA’s undergraduate students and 46 percent of graduate students.4 The overall historical trend in national college enrollments according to gender is set forth in Table

22 below.

1 Los Angeles Times , March 7, 1929. 2 A recent example is a column regarding the University of North Carolina's main campus at Chapel Hill and its relatively large majority of women students (60 percent). Alex Williams, "The New Math on Campus." New York Times , February 5, 2010. 3 U.S. Department of Education, Mobile Digest of Education Statistics : Table 13. Fall undergraduate enrollment in degree-granting postsecondary institutions, by sex and attendance status: Selected years, 1990 through 2012, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/mobile/Enrollment_DGI_Undergraduate_Enrollment.aspx , retrieved online April 10, 2015; U.S. Department of Education, Mobile Digest of Education Statistics : Table 14. Fall post baccalaureate enrollment in postsecondary degree-granting institutions, by sex and attendance status: Selected years, 1990 through 2012, https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/mobile/Enrollment_DGI_Postbaccalaureate_Enrollment.aspx , , retrieved online April 10, 2015. 4 Data from UCLA Office of Analysis and Information Management, retrieved online at http://www.aim.ucla.edu/enrollment/enrollment_demographics_fall.asp . 229

Table 22: Female Students (Undergraduate and Graduate) Enrolled in U.S. Institutions of Higher Education, 1870-2012 5

Year Women students % all students 1870 11,000 21 1880 40,000 33 1890 56,000 36 1900 85,000 37 1910 140,000 40 1920 283,000 47 1930 481,000 44 1940 601,000 40 1950 720,906 32 1961* 1,559,244 38 1970 3,537,245 41 1980 6,222,521 51 1990 7,534,728 55 2000 8,590,520 56 2010 11,974,000 57 2013 11,515,000 57

Women students, as noted in the table, challenged men for parity in enrollments in the 1920s and 1930s, and comprised a heavy majority at early UCLA. UCLA was one of many normal schools transforming in the early twentieth century into other forms, such as teachers colleges, municipal universities, and junior colleges. Where other schools struggled to reach the top tier, however, UCLA sprinted to graduate level work, offering master's degrees in 1934 and doctoral degrees in 1936. 6 During this formative period, women students comprised from one-half to two-thirds of undergraduate enrollments, and half of graduate students. Yet being the majority did not translate to a

5 Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 63; U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics 2007, Table 303.10: Total Fall Enrollment in Degree-Granting Institutions, by Attendance Status, Sex of Student, and Control of Institution, Selected Years, 1947 through 2024 . * data unavailable for 1960 in Digest of Education Statistics (2007) . 6A detailed history of one representative school is Allen W. Trelease, Making North Carolina Literate: The University of North Carolina at Greensboro, from Normal School to Metropolitan University (Durham, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2004). 230 majority’s power for UCLA’s women students; in many ways, they were consigned to junior roles to their male peers.

Women and Higher Education Before UCLA

When UCLA opened in 1919, women students had been attending American colleges for a century. In 1821, Emma Willard opened the Troy Female Seminary in

New York State, with its main mission the training of schoolteachers. 7 Willard's school, through its own positive example and efforts of its graduates, led the way for the founding of other women’s colleges. These institutions were called “colleges” only in the southern states, as in the examples of Wesleyan Female College in Macon, Georgia,

Judson College in Alabama, and Mary Sharp College for Women in Tennessee. 8 At Troy

Female Seminary, the title “college” was avoided—this was because “college” was a name Emma Willard feared men would consider a declaration of equality with men's schools. 9 Regardless of the titles chosen for these new women’s schools—“seminary” or

“college” or others, their missions were limited in an educational landscape dominated by men. According to contemporary observer Catherine Beecher, “those female institutions in our land which are assuming the ambitious name of colleges, have, not one of them, as yet, secured the real features which constitute the chief advantage of such institutions.

They are merely high schools.” 10 Families considered the woman’s colleges and seminaries as “finishing schools” in which woman students could continue their searches for marriageable men. 11

7 Lucas, American Higher Education: A History , 121. 8 The History of Emma Willard School: Emma Willard School, 2003. Available Online: http://www.emmawillard.org/about/history/ehwillard.shtml 9 Ibid. 10 Lucas, 154. 11 Ibid. 231

Mary Lyons, who in 1837 founded the most prestigious and academically competitive women’s college, Mount Holyoke Seminary, did not intend her school’s graduates to compete on equal terms with men; rather she aimed that they be intellectually stimulating partners for their husbands. Mount Holyoke women were to stay near the hearth, a soup ladle in one hand, a book of Sophocles in the other. 12

Teachers at Mount Holyoke were paid a pittance, and were basically volunteers. Students did household chores and cooked their own meals. Religion was a central focus of student life, with Mary Lyon herself presenting a daily scripture lecture and morning and afternoon chapel sessions; upon graduating, students were expected to use their education to help convert non-believers to evangelical Christianity. 13 While most Mount Holyoke graduates (83 percent) taught school after graduation, school teaching was a short-term career for nearly all, as half of the graduates taught for five years or less, and only six percent taught for more than twenty years. Education and careers were short stops before the eventual destination of marriage, and did not disrupt greatly women’s life cycles. 14

Oberlin College, which opened in 1833, successfully experimented early with coeducation, and granted three bachelor’s degrees to women students in 1841. Women students at Oberlin were still restricted in many ways: they were not allowed to deliver public speeches, and in social activities, clubs, and other extra-curricular activities women and men were not permitted to mix. 15 Oberlin's women students were strictly

12 Ronald Butchart, “Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861-1917,” History of Education Quarterly 42 (Spring 2002): 1-17. 13 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education , 208. 14 David F. Allmendinger, Jr., “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life-Planning, 1837- 1850,” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979), 27-46. 15 Lynne D. Gordon, “From Seminary to University: an Overview of Women’s Higher Education, 1870- 1920,” in The History of Higher Education , ed. Lester F. Goodchild and Harold S. Wechsler (Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Publishing, 1997), 475-476. 232 limited, yet generally “the religious, reform-minded atmosphere…favored the presence of women and the development of their intellect.” 16

While a few women’s colleges were in operation and Oberlin and Antioch

College offered coeducation in the 1840s, the denial of broad access to higher education was still troublesome to reformers, such as those attending the 1848 Women’s Rights

Convention in Seneca Falls, New York, where female Oberlin graduates were key players.17 The Convention was organized by Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, whose shared anger against prejudice and bigotry was inflamed when Mott, as a woman, was denied a seat at an international antislavery meeting in London. The Seneca Falls meeting gathered over two hundred people, including forty men. In their Seneca Falls

Declaration, the delegates condemned American patriarchy and tyranny in the educational context: “He has denied her the facilities for obtaining a thorough education, all colleges being closed against her.” 18 The progress made thus far in women’s education was not sufficient for these delegates; equality with men was still a powerful goal.

The Expanding Educational Opportunities for Women in the Late 1800s

More than a half million men, Northern and Southern, died in the American Civil

War (1861-1865). 19 As has been the case in modern wars, their loss produced greater opportunities for women in various male-dominated endeavors, including higher education. These opportunities came in the form of new women’s colleges and state

16 Ibid. 17 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education , 211. 18 E.C. Stanton, S.B. Anthony and M.J. Gage, eds., History of Women's Suffrage , vol. 1 (1887), 70. 19 Drew Gilpin Faust, This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War (New York: Alfred A. Knopf Press, 2008), 1. The Civil War was a “harvest of death,” as 620,000 soldiers lost their lives, equaling the numbers killed in the American Revolution, War of 1812, Mexican American War, Spanish- American War, the two world wars, and Korea combined. 233 universities and colleges founded with federal aid provided under the 1862 Morrill Land

Grant Act. The efforts and example set by this generation of new women college students in this post-war era would set the stage for their daughters and granddaughters during the mass expansion of female enrollments in the twentieth century.

During and after the Civil War, several women's colleges opened with the intention to offer their students higher education equal to that provided to men. This expansion of women’s colleges mainly occurred in the northeastern states. Influential schools such as Bryn Mawr College (1885) in Pennsylvania, Wellesley College (1875) and Smith College (1875) in Massachusetts, and Vassar College (1865) in New York were founded, as well as coordinate colleges such as Radcliffe at Harvard

(Massachusetts) and Barnard at Columbia (New York). These schools, along with Mount

Holyoke, would later form the Seven College Conference (nicknamed “The Seven

Sisters”) in 1926 as a kind of women’s Ivy League, and they continue to meet each year. 20 Matthew Vassar spoke for many of these women’s college founders when he said he wanted to “build a college in the proper sense of the word, an institution which should be to women what Harvard and Yale are to young men.” 21 Mount Holyoke and Vassar, as earlier women’s colleges, employed the seminary as a model for their campus designs, all activity centering on “one building on a picturesque hillside,” while later women’s colleges such as Smith and Bryn Mawr concentrated the campus around a Gothic quadrangle: this followed the example of Oxford and Cambridge and symbolized their equality with men’s schools. 22

20 Vassar Online Encyclopedia, https://vcencyclopedia.vassar.edu/notable-events/the-seven-sisters.html , retrieved online April 10, 2015. 21 Geiger, The History of American Higher Education , 395. 22 Solomon, In the Company of Educated Women, 52-53. 234

Higher education for women assumed major regional differences in the late nineteenth century. Outside the north Atlantic seaboard, no equivalent group to the

Seven Sisters emerged. Fewer than a half-dozen colleges in the northeastern states were coeducational, owing in large part to the great success of the Seven Sisters, other women’s colleges and coordinate institutions. Coeducation was somewhat more popular in the southern states and Mid-Atlantic states, with seventeen and eight coeducational colleges, respectively. In the western states, coeducation took its strongest hold.

Frederick Rudolph argues:

The readiness of the western institutions to adopt coeducation unquestionably derived in part from the facts of western life, where an equality of the sexes was achieved in the ordinary work of the farm. Western woman was not a thing apart. Neither pampered nor fragile, perhaps she was not even as feminine as she might be; but she was a person in her own right who had commanded the respect of her men folk by assuming responsibility and working hard. 23

Andrea Radke-Moss has recently analyzed coeducation in the American West, and finds the following reasons for coeducation’s early advance in the West. First, western states were short on funds for schools, and coeducating men and women was much cheaper than allocating resources for men and women separately. Second, growing student enrollments helped to bring not only students but often their families to the communities hosting the university, and this stimulated local commerce. Third, with a half million men buried in battlefields across the post-Civil War union, there was a shortage of schoolteachers, and women candidates stepped into the breach. Fourth, women students were thought to bring a grace and civility to otherwise rough-and-tumble western campuses. Women were expected to be “practical farm wives, while also developing proper middle-class virtues of refinement and cultivated behavior.” Finally,

23 Rudolph, 314. 235 administrators of western colleges and universities often transferred from Midwestern institutions, where coeducation had been in place for some time and had proven to be a workable arrangement, not as terrifying as eastern academic men seemed to perceive it. 24

Other new institutions included normal schools, which encouraged the gradual integration of women students into public higher education. In 1870 the University of

Missouri allowed women students to apply to its new Normal Department due to the desperate need for schoolteachers in public schools, yet for at least the first year, women students were kept apart on campus from male students and were even walked to their classes by teachers. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, normal schools grew ever more popular. By 1894, 100,000 students across the nation—86,000 of them women students—were attending normal schools. 25 As with other institutions of higher education, regional differences appeared in normal school enrollments, with a lower proportion of women enrolled in normal schools in southern states. In the western states, the opposite was the case, with striking examples in individual cases; for example, women comprised an increasing share of enrollments at the State Normal School in San

Jose, California, growing from 83 percent in 1874 to 94 percent in 1914. 26

Beyond women's colleges and normal schools, large private and state universities grappled with coeducation in the late 19 th century. The University of Iowa admitted women in 1855, followed by the University of Wisconsin in 1863, followed in the 1860s and 1870s by the universities of Indiana, Missouri, Michigan, and California. 27 These

24 Radke-Moss, 6-7. 25 Victor Parente, “Normal Schools” in A Historical Dictionary of Women’s Education in the United States . Linda Eisenmann, ed. (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998). 26 The United States did not enter the First World War until 1917, removing this as a factor in the above referenced increase the proportion of women in San Jose’s student body. 27 Rudolph, 313. 236 public universities, spearheaded by Cornell’s unique example, described below, led the way to mass coeducation in the United States.

Coeducation at Cornell was “a fiery ordeal” according to McCary Thomas, who attended from 1875 to 1879 and later served as President at Bryn Mawr College (1894-

1922). 28 Though women had won access to a popular university—its first freshman class in 1868 was the largest in the nation’s history—there were significant drawbacks. As with many coeducational universities, women students faced a male-dominated, paternalistic university administration, and were required to live in university-approved housing. This housing policy limited admissions of female students according to availability of beds available on campus for them, causing the rejection of more women than men, regardless of ability. 29 In 1900, 14 percent of Cornell students were female, and this percentage did not reach 25 percent until the 1960s. 30

In 1837, when the University of Michigan was chartered, express language in the charter ordered that all qualified persons should be admitted, and this seemed to open the door to women’s admissions. It would be thirty-three years before a woman took her seat in a Michigan classroom (In 1858 and 1859, women’s applications were rejected). 31

From 1870, when the first female student enrolled at Michigan, through the 1920s, what has been called a “dangerous experiment”—coeducation at Michigan—proceeded through at least two phases. At least one historian believed the late nineteenth century to be a golden age for Michigan’s pioneering women students, as they enjoyed relative

28 Conable , 111. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Conable, 62. 237 equality with men in both undergraduate classes and in professional education. 32 By the

1920s, though, women students had been forced out of the central life of the university and struggled to claim their own space. 33 Common space was segregated by gender, with the intramural building and its swimming pool reserved only for men. Literary societies and musical and dramatic organizations were also divided by sex (with the strange exception of the comedy club). The student newspaper in its content and its advertising was clearly directed toward male readers. Coed groups were limited mainly to religious organizations and foreign language societies. In 1921, only four women professors were on the entire Michigan faculty, aside from professors in the physical education field. 34

The University of Chicago, which opened in 1892, is perhaps the place where coeducation was accomplished most successfully in the late nineteenth century. The former president of Wellesley College and an alumna of the University of Michigan,

Alice Freeman Palmer, was Chicago’s dean of women students when its doors opened. 35

Thanks in large measure to Palmer’s leadership, women "flourished at Chicago…they were at ease in the classroom and indeed surpassed their male counterparts with respect to such academic honors as Phi Beta Kappa." 36 By 1902, 242 women students (48 percent of the total) were enrolled at Chicago. The faculty senate felt compelled because of a perceived threat to male students to pass an institutional segregation act, which was promptly ignored in practice by men and women students on campus. 37

32 McGuigan, A Dangerous Experiment; Bordin, Women at Michigan. 33 Bordin, 3. 34 Ibid., 46. 35 Horowitz, Campus Life, 111. 36 Ibid. 37 Thelin, History of American Higher Education , 185. 238

Per its founder's preferences (expressed through his widow, Mrs. Leland

Stanford), Stanford University strictly limited the admission of female students. Mrs.

Stanford noted following the 1898-1899 academic year that 480 of 1,100 students were women; she did not want Stanford to become a female institution. At a meeting of the

National Woman Suffrage Association in 1901, Jane Stanford offered her explanation for why she decided to put a cap of 500 on women students’ enrollment at the university. It had been she, not Leland Stanford Senior, who had argued for the inclusion of woman students from the beginning of the project. She had convinced her husband to allow such equality; however, he still desired that the school be primarily for men. When the enrollment of women students crept forward to the point where a sizable male majority was threatened, Mrs. Stanford imposed the cap on enrollment of women, abiding strictly by the dead founder’s desires, even though she had strongly supported the drive in

California for a women’s suffrage amendment in 1896. The university began a quota system in 1899, in which the number of women students was restricted to five hundred of the total. Finally, in 1904, a ratio of three males to one female was officially established as the Stanford admissions policy. This policy lasted until 1933, when the Great

Depression’s negative effects on enrollments forced Stanford to allow more women students. 38 Limits on their numbers did not free up greater institutional funds for scholarships for women. On the contrary, most scholarships made available to students were given to men; for example, in 1918-1919 Stanford University had only three scholarships available to women. 39

The Important Example of Berkeley

38 Michael J. Korff, J. Student Control and University Government at Stanford: The Evolving Student- University Relationship (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 1975). 39 Ibid. 239

Controversies over female attendance at the University of California erupted in the years immediately before and after the turn of the century. A notable feature of the original University of California campus, located first at Oakland, then at Berkeley, was the relatively large and consistently growing share of female students. In 1870, eight women were enrolled, which represented only 9 percent of the student body; however, by

1900, nearly half (46 percent) of the students enrolled at Berkeley were women. Male administrators feared that the female population was growing too large at the University of California and that this trend would only increase with Stanford University's implementation of restrictions on female enrollment. In 1904, the President of the

University of California, President Benjamin Wheeler lectured the women students:

“You are not like men and must recognize the fact….You may have the same studies as the men, but you must put them to different use. You are…here for the preparation of marriage and motherhood.” 40 This attitude extended to volunteer activities in the First

World War. Unlike their peers in women's and coordinate colleges such as Vassar,

Barnard, Sophie Newcomb, and Smith, no UC Berkeley women students participated in ambulance units or overseas relief work. 41 When junior colleges began to pop up all over

California during and after World War I, Wheeler believed women "were more likely than men to remain at home and attend the junior colleges,” thus relieving the “problems” of a growing share of women students at Berkeley. 42

During World War I and the decade after, women students seized greater opportunities for access to Berkeley. Yet once on campus, great support for them was not forthcoming. Information about the financial difficulties of women students at the

40 Lucas, 158. 41 Lynn D Gordon, Gender and Higher Education, 82. 42 Ibid., 159 240

University of California is provided in Lucy W. Stebbins's "Report of the Dean of

Women" in the Annual Report of the President of the University of California for the years 1916-1924. 43 One typical report is the story of Clara Beyer, the daughter of a

Danish immigrant: in 1915, she worked in canneries, packed fruit, and waitressed in order to raise money for her room and board while she attended classes at the University of California at Berkeley. 44 At Berkeley in 1916-17, women's college expenses were between $100 and $500, a sizable sum for the time. 45 These relatively high expenses, along with the absence of government grants or loans, conspired to keep all but the daughters of rich families from attending college. With regard to housing, the University of California attempted some light regulation of private boarding houses, but was slow to build dormitories or other campus housing for women students. Boarders in Berkeley were pleased to rent to students, and so the University did not see the need to become involved. 46 Until 1929, only one University-operated dormitory on campus existed,

College Hall, a private dormitory for women opened in 1909 with the unofficial assistance of the university’s Dean of Women. 47

The University of California did not devote many resources toward women’s buildings or spaces on campus even though, as shown in Table 23 below, where women approached parity with men in enrollments by 1930.48

43 Ibid., 70. 44 Ibid. Eventually Clara Beyer graduated from the University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree and later worked for the federal government as a social analyst. 45 Ibid., 71. 46 Clifford, 99. 47 Centennial Record, 104 48 Rosenberg, "The Limits of Access," 3. 241

Table 23: Women Enrolled as Undergraduate Students: University of California, Berkeley (UCB) ; University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) , 1870-1960, 2014 49

Year Number of % of UCB Number of % of UCLA Women Undergrads Women Undergrads Undergrads (Women) Undergrads at (Women) at UCB UCLA

1870 8 9 N/A N/A 1880 62 25 N/A N/A 1890 100 23 N/A N/A 1900 951 46 N/A N/A 1910 1,176 36 N/A N/A 1920 4,401 45 437* 48 1930 4,258 46 3,823 60 1940 5,391 39 4,396 49 1950 5,270 32 4,679 38 1960 6,441 40 6,085 46 2014 14,135 52 16,500 56

Berkeley required Phoebe Hearst's benevolence in order to build a women’s gymnasium. 50 This gym, built in 1898, was destroyed by fire in 1922 but not replaced until 1927, and then it was only replaced through private action: William Randolph

Hearst built the new women’s gym in honor of his late mother’s memory. 51 When a women’s gymnasium was constructed for the Los Angeles campus in 1932, it was built with state funding, perhaps because as seen in the table below, a higher percentage of

UCLA students were women and the campus came from a normal school history of substantial majorities of female enrollments.

49 Centennial Record , 212-225; UCLA Academic Planning & Budget: Enrollment Demographics, Fall 2014, http://www.aim.ucla.edu/tables/enrollment_demographics_fall.aspx ; UC Berkeley Office of Planning and Analysis, Fall Enrollment Data, http://opa.berkeley.edu/uc-berkeley-fall-enrollment-data . * UCLA's 1920 figure includes only students enrolled in College of Letters and Sciences. Excludes 1,024 students enrolled in the Teachers' College for which gender breakdown is not yet available. Based on recent enrollments at the prior State Normal School, these thousand students would have been mainly women, approximately 70-80 percent of the total.

50 Solomon, 104. 51 Centennial Record, 343. 242

Women students greatly affected the trajectory of the Berkeley campus, and therefore also affected future campuses of the University of California system. By 1920, the University of California enrolled more women students than any other college or university in the country. From 1900 to 1930, Berkeley's women students were enrolled

“mostly in the teacher’s credential and nursing programs and in fields such as English and home economics.” 52 As Geraldine Clifford has observed, "the University of

California’s sometimes cruel, sometimes reluctant, and sometimes deliberate preparation of teachers encouraged ever more women to go to college—and thereby to become a progressively larger share of the student body at this and other institutions."53 Clifford further speculates, “[W]ithout their numbers, a remarkable percentage of the total student body, it is possible that the liberal arts would have languished…and Berkeley…confined to the basic land grant university functions of agriculture, mining, and engineering.” 54

Perhaps the liberal arts were granted a boost at UCLA in its early years thanks to its own heavy women majorities. As discussed in Chapter 9, women students far outnumbered men both in the Normal School and at UCLA in its early existence, and were not overtaken in enrollments until the late 1930s. 55 This was consistently considered by the public as a problem, even as an alarming problem. For example, the Los Angeles Times reported of a turn-of-the-century graduation, “Saved from being an Adamless Eden by the presence of one lone young man, the mid-year class of 1906 of the Los Angeles State

Normal School, composed of fifty-two young ladies and the aforesaid masculine person,

52 Douglass, The Conditions for Admission , 22-23. 53 Clifford, 56. 54 Ibid. 55 University of California Centennial Record, 212-225. 243 was graduated last night with due honors.” 56 Women were well represented across the curriculum, not clustered in home economics or elementary education classes, (though these courses were popular among women). 57 They took a share of the campus commons, and also carved out their own space. Their stories are vital to understanding the histories of UCLA, Los Angeles, southern California, and higher education between the wars.

Women Students at the Southern Branch and UCLA, 1919-1941

Although women were in the great majority, early UCLA developed a student life similar to that of other contemporary coeducational colleges. In this way, it paralleled the track taken by the other normal schools that were transforming into other institutional types, mainly teachers colleges. UCLA's privileged position as the first (and only) public university in Los Angeles quickened and intensified its institutional transformation.

College activities previously only enjoyed at USC, Pomona, or Occidental were now embraced by the students of the new Southern Branch. The distant romance of Berkeley lost much of its sparkle for Southern Californians, as UCLA provided a full college student life—fraternal organizations, newspapers and journals, major collegiate athletics, and clubs.

Normal school graduates in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries played a great role in shaping public higher education across the nation and especially in

California. The normal schools’ main mission was to train schoolteachers: school teaching was a predominantly female occupation, and so it is not surprising that women

56 “Pretty Girls in White: More than Half-Hundred Normal Graduates Narrow Escape from Adamless Eden,” Los Angeles Times , February 2, 1906. 57 This is based on the author’s review of official Southern Branch and UCLA Student yearbooks from 1919, 1926, and 1927. Students listed their majors along with other biographical data next to their photographs. 244 comprised the bulk of students. From 1863 to 1889, for example, 1,222 women students and only 221 men graduated from the San José State Normal School. 58 The Los Angeles

State Normal School's enrollments were comprised of consistent solid female majorities, as seen in Table 24 below.

Table 24: Los Angeles State Normal School, Enrollments by Gender, 1882-1918 59

Year Total Women Men

1882-83 128 105 23 1889-90 288 251 37 1894-95 435 366 69 1899-1900 642 574 68 1904-05 460 440 20 1909-10 773 750 23 1914-15 1,801 1,732 69 1918-19 996 960 36

Cynthia Jepsen, who graduated from UCLA in 1926, associated the predecessor

Normal School with the lingering female majority at the Southern Branch: “we did have the training school, which made us, starting out, a women’s college. In fact we used to laugh and say we could—the girls in the sorority—count the five good looking men on campus on one hand.” 60 Eleanor Lloyd Dees, who graduated from UCLA in 1927, further explained the lasting popularity of the Normal School’s curriculum among UCLA women students. “If a family had a son and daughter,” she recalled, “”they would make quite an effort to send the son to a university—even if it was somewhat of a financial struggle—that would prepare him for a profession….they decided that the Normal

58 Clifford, 58. 59 UCLA Recorder's Office Statistical Reports, 1930-35.

60 Cynthia Jepsen, “Westwood Pioneers: Cynthia Jepsen,” Westwood Pioneers Oral History Transcript, 1979-1985 . Interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 315. 245

School, which in my years at UCLA was still at UCLA, was there they felt the girls could get a fine education and it wouldn’t cost as much.”61

Large numbers of early UCLA's women students were enrolled in teaching courses, which makes sense considering the recent transition from normal school to university. 62 Within five years, enrollments in letters and science had surpassed the

"teachers’ courses," yet men's enrollments did not surpass women's enrollments until the

1930's. 63 As Table 25 below illustrates, a decade following UCLA's founding, new women students far outnumbered their male counterparts in the Teachers College, and were nearly even in the College of Letters and Science.

Table 25: Enrollments of New UCLA Undergraduate Students: Breakdown by College; Location of Last School; Selected High Schools, Fall 1929 64 . N=1,746.

College of Letters and Sciences Teachers College Women Men Women Men 609 661 445 31

Los Angeles 290 312 150 9 County Los Angeles 104 107 84 5 City

Hollywood 40 41 15 0 Los Angeles 62 73 32 2 Manual Arts 17 16 5 1 Polytechnic 5 33 15 2 Westlake 11 0 3 0 Marlborough 11 0 4 0

Students listed their majors in the yearbooks, and it is apparent many women students—certainly a majority—engaged in fields of study other than education. Several

61 Dees, Oral History, 176. 62 Hamilton and Jackson, 31. 63 Douglass, 70. 64 University of California. Office of the Registrar: Statistics, Fall 1919-1969 . 246 of the non-education majors listed by women were zoology, economics, commerce, pre- journalism, chemistry, botany, pre-medical, mathematics, physics, and geology. 65

Judging historical questions by reviewing yearbooks from the time, of course, is not a perfect historical method. Dean McHenry recalls a female classmate who “worked her way through [college], babysitting, working as a short-order cook, and so on. She got through in four years, but she didn’t have time to do things. And her picture’s not in the yearbook because she didn’t have the three dollars to have her picture taken.” 66 Florence

Wittenberg pointed out, “Many of the students did not have the five dollars to have their pictures taken and couldn’t pay for their senior cap and gown picture.” 67

Evelyn Woodroof Field remembers her career choices as limited, stating, “in those times, a woman’s place in business was just nil…there were certain things you couldn’t do.” Field and her brother wanted to attend law school, but her family decided to devote resources to their son. Evelyn Field started on the pre-legal course, but switched quickly to a physical education major. 68 She explained, “my father had asked in his will that my brother…go for his graduate years to Harvard Law School, and he did…that was a wish of the family. I don’t know what else I could have done except teach or become a nun, and I was not cut out for the nun part.” 69

The transition to UCLA sometimes meant relief from an arduous high school curriculum. Girls' Collegiate School in Los Angeles had worked Lucy Guild Toberman hard, and she was in no mood to repeat the experience:

65 Southern Branch of the University of California 1926-1927 Yearbook (Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles Associated Students, 1927). 66 McHenry, 45. 67 Wittenberg, 98. 68 Field, 21. 69 Ibid., 47. 247

my mother had graduated from Bryn Mawr, so I had to take all these awful courses like physics and calculus and all these terribly advanced courses....After I had been admitted to Bryn Mawr—it was very difficult to get into in those days, too—I said to my mother, “Now I've been to Girls' Collegiate, I'm all through with girls. I want to go and have some fun.' So I said. “I want to go to UCLA.” So I applied for UCLA and got in. And my mother was very nice about it. 70

Whether women's substantial enrollments enabled their full participation on campus and in the classroom is unclear. Women students assumed certain leadership roles, whether on student council, working for the yearbook, or for the student newspaper. University leaders, who were usually men, did not encourage women to assume outspoken roles; however, many strong women administrators emerged regardless. 71 In 1926, UCLA’s Dean of Women referred proudly to the thousands of women students enrolled that year, but was even prouder of the quiet-as-a-church-mouse manner in which women students had played their roles:

Highest commendation is due for your standards of behavior and dress. High standards do not just happen. Yours are the result of a well-organized and never ending campaign, the effectiveness of which is all the more laudable because of the quiet manner in which it has been conducted. 72

UCLA, like Berkeley, lacked student housing on campus, especially for women.

In 1923, UCLA’s Dean of Women, Helen Mathewson, opened a club which housed 26 women students of limited means. A Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA) house opened in 1929 and was converted to a student residence in 1936; this residence housed 34 women students and was often used by the campus’s few international

70 Toberman, 176. 71 Jana Nidiffer, Pioneering Deans of Women: More than Wise and Pious Matrons (New York: Teachers College Press, 2000). 72 Southern Branch of the University of California 1925-1926 Yearbook (Los Angeles: University of California Los Angeles Associated Students, 1926). 248 students. 73 Mira Hershey donated a residence hall for women in 1931, which was the first dormitory of any kind on campus. 74 While this new hall was meant for all female students, this apparently did not include Mabel Ota, who recalled, “Since I was from out of town, I wanted to stay in the dormitories. But they didn’t allow any Japanese. I ended up staying at the Japanese YMCA in Boyle Heights and commuted back and forth every day.” 75

Responding to this campus need, sororities helped to provide housing for a large number of UCLA women students, especially beginning in the late 1920s in the large new houses constructed along Hilgard Avenue in Westwood. Sorority leaders often found it difficult to obtain bank financing to build their houses; however at UCLA, Janss

Investment Company (which was developing the commercial and residential areas of

Westwood) was more welcoming to women. Edwin Janss formed a company, the

Holmby Corporation, to help sororities (but not fraternities) finance the construction of their new houses along Hilgard Avenue.76 Janss, according to one contemporary observer, remarked of this policy, “I believe in women. Women always pay their debts.

I can’t say so much for fraternities, but women pay their debts.” 77 Janss had another good reason to “believe in women”: sorority members often worked as models in

73 Regarding the YMCA as a significant source and provider of college student housing, see Nathan F. Alleman and Dorothy E. Finnegan, “Believe you have a mission in life and steadily pursue it”: Campus YMCAs Presage Student Development Theory, 1894-1939. Higher Education in Review 6, 11-45; Dorn, "A Woman's World." 74 Centennial Record, 366. 75 Lim, 20. Lim explains that “there did not seem to be any written clauses that explicitly excluded non- European Americans from living in Hershey Hall” at this time, but that non-White students would simply be told when they are inquired for housing that no rooms were available at that time. Cecilia Rasmussen, “Little Tokyo’s Roots Firm After Trials,” Los Angeles Times, January 21, 2001, http://articles.latimes.com/2001/jan/21/local/me-15253 , retrieved online January 2, 2016. The Nishi Hongwanji Buddhist Temple acted as the Japanese YMCA in the 1930s in what is today Little Tokyo near downtown Los Angeles; this is about 15 miles from UCLA along the pre-interstate path (Santa Monica Blvd. to Sunset Blvd. to Westwood). This was a long commute then and today. 76 Baldwin, 59. 77 Ibid., 58. 249 newspaper advertisements for the Janss Company's new homes in Westwood, Holmby

Hills, and Bel Air. 78

Sororities did not only supply housing for women students, but scholarship opportunities as well. As White sororities blocked Japanese American students from admission, in 1928, 14 students formed Chi Alpha Delta, the first fraternal organization for non-White women students on the Westwood campus (one out of the 38 national sororities active at UCLA in 1929). Chi Alpha Delta allowed its members access to scholarship competitions and monies, and offered crucial social support and networking chances for Japanese American students, who otherwise would have been excluded for the heavily Greek-dominated social life on campus. What Chi Alpha Delta was not able to provide was housing, as its leaders and supporters were blocked from purchasing real estate in Westwood due to racially restrictive covenants, as outlined in the following chapter.

In the first half of the twentieth century, deans of women were powerful leaders on coeducational campuses, and worked as strong advocates for women students. 79 After

World War II, such positions were gradually eliminated, but not before the deans had been shifted from roles as advocates to student conduct policewomen. 80 When these positions faded away in the 1970s, they were not greatly mourned, as their disciplinary roles were all that remained in the memories of recent graduates. Yet for previous generations, the deans had played different, vital roles. During the early 1900s and until

World War II, deans of women were "the first senior administrators on coeducational

78 Ibid., 79. 79 See Nidiffer , Pioneering Deans of Women; Carolyn Terry Bashaw, "Stalwart Women": A Historical Analysis of Deans of Women in the South . New York: Teachers College Press, 1999. 80 Robert A. Schwartz, "How Deans of Women Became Men," Review of Higher Education 20 (4) (1997), 419-436. 250 campuses," and "improved the material lot" of their students. 81 These early women administrators, including, for example, Marion Talbot (University of Chicago, 1892-

1925), Mary Bidwell Breed, (Indiana University, 1901-1906), Ada Louise Comstock

(University of Minnesota, 1906-1912), Lois Kimball Mathews Rosenberry (University of

Wisconsin, 1911-1918), and Lucy Sprague Mitchell (University of California, Berkeley,

1906-1912) have been the subjects of important recent scholarship. 82 In this chapter, we add the story of UCLA's first Dean of Women to help round out this research, and most importantly, to consider her peculiar example: that of a Dean of Women leading a student body of nearly all women at a normal school to presiding over an ever shrinking majority at a university.

Helen Mathewson Laughlin, Counselor of Women at the L.A. Normal School and then Dean of Women at UCLA, was remembered as “a sensitive woman who wanted every woman to have her place in the university world.” 83 Dean Laughlin was highly influential with women students, working hard tirelessly on their behalf. Her help came in ways unofficial but still desperately needed. One student recalled, “[Dean Laughlin] had a clothes cupboard in which she kept evening dresses and suits and other clothes which her wealthy friends would donate to her. And when some poor girl would come in who didn’t have a formal dress to wear to a dance, she would open the cupboard and they would find something that would fit so that the girl could go to the dance and be

81 Jana Nidiffer, "Advocates on Campus: Deans of Women Create a New Profession," In Women Administrators in Higher Education: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives , ed. Jana Nidiffer and Carolyn Terry Bradshaw, (Albany: SUNY Press: 2001), 135. 82 Ibid. 83 Sandy Siegel, “A Woman’s Work,” UCLA Magazine, October 1, 2013, http://magazine.ucla.edu/depts/hailhills/a-womans-work/ . 251 happy.” 84 In another example, Laughlin took energetic measures to protect a vulnerable student:

This girl came to her and said she was not feeling well. Dean Laughlin sent her to the doctor, and it was discovered that the young lady was pregnant. Dean Laughlin said "What can you do?" And the doctor said, "Well, I think you could call it a tumor." So she was given a leave of absence because she had a tumor and was sent to a protective place until the tumor arrived. Dean Laughlin arranged for the adoption of a beautiful, red-headed baby that somewhat resembled a very popular man on the campus. The girl returned to her Midwestern home. She was terrified that her parents would discover her situation, which they never did. 85

Laughlin was both supportive and dismissive of Japanese American women students, supporting the creation of Chi Alpha Delta, for example, but she discouraged the president of this sorority, Frances Kitagawa, in her career path. Kitagawa remembered that “Dean Laughlin, who was also a Chi advisor, didn’t want me to continue in education or to get my teaching credentials. She wanted me to change my major. She said to me, ‘where are you going to teach? They’re not going to hire you. Are you going to teach in Japan or Hawaii?’” Laughlin might have been giving caring, conservative advice at the time, but she lacked the imagination to envision a new and better future for her students beyond the prejudiced present. Kitagawa went on to teach for 34 years in

California public schools. 86

As American society and higher education were both still dominated by men during the 1920s and 1930s, perhaps it ought not be expected that a major state university— even one consisting of large female majorities in enrollment—would witness women holding major leadership roles on campus. With regard to UCLA's campus leadership positions in student government and extracurricular activities, men

84 Baldwin, 111-112. 85 Ibid., 112. 86 Lim, 19-20. 252 still won the bulk of them. Nevertheless women students made their mark. They branched out with their male counterparts into varied academic fields, including graduate studies, when these became available, rallied around their strong Dean of Women, and grew vibrant sorority chapters, building beautiful houses that last to the present day. Early

UCLA’s women students did not confine themselves to education or home economics courses, as had been the case in the Normal School. No limits were laid on their enrollment numbers, and even without university housing provided on campus, women students commuted on trains and in buses to class, or lived with friends packed into tiny apartments. Finally, simply through their large numbers, women students led the way for their descendants to push forward to majority status again in the late twentieth century.

253

Chapter 10: The Move to Westwood Village

Westwood Village was the first rigorously planned academic-commercial-residential community, with a college campus adjacent to shops, amenities, and homes. Florence

Wittenberg moved to Beverly Hills—“it was just a little town then, a village” —with her family when she was 11 years old, and she “saw the first brick house built on Beverly Glen Blvd. It was the first house in Westwood. This was the first time in the world that a college town developed around a university…Westwood was unique.” 1 Realtors and Regents struck a bargain in 1925 when the University of California agreed to move its Southern Campus to Westwood Hills.

UCLA was given 300 acres of prime real estate, and the Janss Investment Company got the assured windfall of developing land adjacent to the new campus, ritzy Bel-Air, and the new business corridor running from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean along Wilshire

Boulevard. University of California Regent Edward Dickson thought of the deal in utopian terms:

The campus, resting on the slopes of the Beverly-Westwood Hills and commanding a magnificent view of the ocean, is the center of a great undeveloped territory. About the university, therefore, can be built up a college town, ideal in every respect…the campus of 385 acres is sufficient for all future needs. The town itself can now be laid out permanently, methodically and under ideal conditions--a situation without parallel in educational history…with the campus as the central unit, a college town can be built up around it that will embody all of the best features of the various old college communities in Europe and America. 2

American colleges, unlike their European counterparts, have for the most part developed in rural areas and in small towns and villages. Oxford and Cambridge, two English universities centered on residential colleges, had a great influence on the planning of early American colleges, and also because colleges were founded early in the physical development of American

1 Wittenberg, 4. Wittenberg likely meant that this was the first time a college town had been commercially planned at the same time, purposefully, by a private developer simultaneously with a brand new public university. College towns have developed around universities in the United States since Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Harvard. 2 Dickson,

254

cities. European universities had historically been found in cities, but American colleges were

nearly the opposite: “the placing of colleges in the countryside or even the wilderness [was] an

unprecedented break with European tradition. The romantic notion of a college in nature,

removed from the corrupting forces of the city, became an American ideal.” 3

Oxford and Cambridge heavily influenced the development of Thomas Jefferson's academic village at the University of Virginia. This village concept was then pursued either within the bounds of college campuses, or was echoed haphazardly in the areas surrounding colleges. In Westwood, UCLA skipped the decades-long drift from town to campus, such as may be observed in the University of California, Berkeley’s history. Boundaries were set at the beginning, streets planned and lay down, homes and businesses built, electric lights lit, and dreams of retail success danced in the Janss Investment Company’s collective head.

Studies have been conducted on college towns 4; urban universities 5; universities as real estate developers 6, and college campus architecture and design. 7 No studies exist regarding "the

3 Patrick Venable Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1984), 4. 4 Blake Gumprecht, The American College Town (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008). Gumprecht, who recently wrote the first comprehensive study of college towns in the United States defined a college town as "any city where a college or university and the cultures it creates exert a dominant influence over the character of the town." Many of his college towns, as defined above, host state flagship colleges and universities, which were either founded thanks to or greatly enhanced by federal support under the Morrill Land Grant Act of 1862, and are seldom found in major metropolitan areas but rather in smaller cities that grew up around the university. Regional state colleges and private liberal arts colleges are also often found in cities with populations under 100,000 and in small towns, many of which may be considered college towns. Colleges and universities located in large metropolitan areas are not considered in Gumprecht's study, as "the socioeconomic diversity of such places dilutes the influence of a college." Therefore, Gumprecht does not include the University of California, Los Angeles in his study, but does consider the University of California, Irvine, and Claremont Colleges. 5 M.R. Berube, The Urban University in America (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, Inc., 1978); Coalition of Urban Serving Universities, Urban Universities: Anchors Generating Prosperity for America's Cities, 2011, http://www.usucoalition.org/downloads/part6/USU_White_Paper_Report_2010.pdf . 6 David C. Perry and Wim Wiewel, Eds. The University as Urban Developer (Armonk, New York: M.E. Sharpe, Inc., 2005); Judith Rodin, The University & Urban Revival: Out of the Ivory Tower and Into the Streets (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007). 7 Richard P. Dober, Campus Landscapes: Functions, Forms, Features (New York: John Wiley & Sons, Inc., 2000); Richard P. Dober, Campus Architecture: Building in the Groves of Academe (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996); Turner, Campus: An American Planning Tradition ; Thomas A. Gaines, The Campus as a Work of Art (New York: Praeger Publishers 1991); Stefan Muthesius, The Postwar University: Utopianist Campus and College (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000).

255 relationship between campus and residential development during the early twentieth century, an important one for many metropolitan areas." 8 UCLA and neighboring Westwood Village are the most ambitious example of this simultaneous gown and town development. 9

Rural areas and small towns have been favored in the placement of American college campuses because cities were distrusted as sinks of sin, and natural settings were thought pure and good, naturally. 10 Thomas Jefferson championed the academic village, typically a green field ringed by little rustic houses. 11 Jefferson's University of Virginia plan was repeated on college campuses across the nation. 12

As mentioned above, college towns have been recently analyzed, yet another type of environment, the urban academic village, has not been carefully considered. Cities grew along with the nation, and villages within these cities sprang up in the early twentieth century. These

"urban villages" are "resented because they are exclusive." 13 Urban village dwellers seek

"urbanity without responsibility,” to have the advantages of city life while avoiding the costs. In

Los Angeles, college campuses are the clearest examples of urban villages, and Westwood is "in some ways the prototypically self-conscious Los Angeles 'village.'" 14 If UCLA ever seemed separated or alienated from Los Angeles, this must at least in part be due to geographic destiny, due to its setting among an exclusive area on the city’s west side in an urban village.

8 Richard A. Longstreth, City Center to Regional Mall: Architecture, the Automobile, and Retailing in Los Angeles, 1920-1950 (Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press, 1997), 408. 9 Richard A. Longstreth, Email with Author, September 23, 2009. 10 Rudolph, 91-92. 11 Turner, 12. 12 Ibid. 13 William A. McClung, Landscapes of Desire: Anglo Mythologies of Los Angeles (Berkeley, California: University of California Press, 2000), 156. 14 Ibid.

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College and Universities Relocating Campuses and Historical Parallels to UCLA

Clark Kerr famously observed that of the seventy or eighty institutions in Western civilization that retained their same basic mission and had operated without interruption, most are medieval universities. 15 Perhaps the dominant image of brick buildings, towers, and spires in our collective imaginations makes it appear that prestigious universities are ancient, fixed, immovable. However, even from their beginnings, universities--or at least those based in cities-- physically wandered. In the case of medieval universities, Christopher Lucas explains,

"[B]ecause the medieval university lacked fixed facilities of its own, only renting lecture halls and lodgings as needed, the act of suspending lectures and moving the entire stadium to a new location was always a distinct possibility, as some towns and cities learned to their chagrin." 16 In the thirteenth century, the universities at Padua and Bologna were enticed by other Italian towns to relocate, and the University of Paris lost a large number of its faculty to other French towns, such as Rheims, Toulouse, Angiers, and Orléans, before scholars were mollified by significant privileges granted to them. 17 Centuries later, leaders of the fledgling American Republic considered a plan to hire and transport the entire faculty of the University of Geneva to form the core of a proposed new national university; however, costs and language conflicts quickly ruled the plan out. 18

Much of the prestige attached to elite colleges and universities is owed to their timelessness, to the impression that ivy-clad buildings have been fixed upon ancient campuses for centuries. This is a false impression, especially in the case of institutions in urban environments. Schools moved again and again across Los Angeles, and these institutions

15 Kerr, The Uses of the University , 113. 16 Lucas, 63. 17 Ibid., 63-64. 18 David Madsen, The National University: Enduring Dream of the USA (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1966).

257 followed the examples of their older eastern cousins. UCLA's move west only repeated a common historical tactic of university leaders craving academic living space and literally, greener pastures.

Historical Examples of Elite Universities’ Campus Moves

Table 26 shows the historic moves (and non-moves) of the members of the American

Association of Universities during the 1920s and 1930s.

Table 26: Original Main Campus Site and Main Campus Moves (if any): American Association of University Members Existing at or around UCLA’s founding (1919) and move to Westwood Campus (1929)

University Founding Original Location Moves/Relocations of Main Campus (if any): Date of Main Campus When, Where and Why

Columbia 1754 Lower Manhattan 1857: moved to Park Place in midtown; 1896: moved to Morningside Heights (also in Manhattan) Cornell 1865 Ithaca, NY Built on Ezra Cornell’s farm on original 210 acre site (745 acres today) Harvard 1636 Cambridge, MA Cambridge was a separate village from Boston in 17 th century. Purchase of land in neighboring suburb Allston in last decade has been controversial—it is a major campus move if not called such. Johns 1876 Downtown Moved to big pastoral campus in 1914 on the Hopkins Baltimore, MD former Homewood estate in what is now North Baltimore. Vaunted medical school is now on east campus. McGill 1821 Montreal, Quebec James McGill provided 47 acre bequest for campus in Golden Mile ritzy area of Montreal. Second campus established in 1905 (MacDonald campus) for agriculture Northwestern 1857 Evanston, IL, a Original campus of 240 acres developed in Chicago suburb on 1850s simultaneously with city of Evanston; Lake Michigan law and medical schools are located in downtown Chicago Ohio State 1870 Columbus, OH Owing to influence of future U.S. President Rutherford B. Hayes, main campus of 1,764 acres placed 2.5 miles north of downtown Columbus, the state capital. (Morrill Land

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Grant given to new campus rather than to Ohio University or Miami University.) Penn 1740 Downtown 1802: moved to a new campus also in city’s Philadelphia center; in 1872 moved to a campus in what was then a suburb in West Philadelphia. Princeton 1746 Elizabeth, NJ Moved to Newark, NJ in 1747, then to present location in Princeton, NJ in 1756. Main campus building, Nassau Hall among the largest buildings in Britain’s North American colonies.

Stanford 1890 Palo Alto, CA Campus built on former site of Leland Stanford’s horse farm: over 8,000 acres). University of 1868 Berkeley, CA First campus in Oakland. Moved in 1873 to California, vacant areas near Berkeley. Berkeley University of 1890 Chicago, IL (Hyde Land for main campus donated by Marshall Chicago Park) Field (211 acres)—seven miles south of today’s downtown Chicago. University of 1867 Twin cities of Morrill Act Land-Grant university placed by Illinois, Urbana, IL and Illinois legislature on 1500 acre site in Urbana- Champaign, IL Champaign and Urbana. Champaign

University of 1847 Iowa City, IA Main campus located in original capital city Iowa of state; capital moved to Des Moines and University was granted the old State Capitol Building. 1,800 acre campus bisected by Iowa River.

University of 1863 Lawrence, KS Lawrence received original campus site based Kansas on its promise to donate land for purpose; if it had declined, Emporia would have gotten the main campus). Former governor provided original 40 acres for campus in land exchange. University of 1837 Ann Arbor, MI Town took 40 acres of land it had Michigan unsuccessfully tried to donate for the state capital and devoted it to successful bid for university. University of 1839 Columbia, MO Towns of Columbia and Boone County Missouri offered the state land and cash for rights to university’s main campus in 1839. In 1890, a fire destroyed the main campus building, and

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there were attempts to move campus west to Sedalia, but these efforts were beat off. University of 1793 Chapel Hill, NC Original campus built near a chapel that was North centrally located in the state. (The Old Well, Carolina, first source of water for campus) still exists Chapel Hill and is a historical marker of original site. University of 1827 Toronto, Ontario Land provided by three local benefactors (50 Toronto acres each) of forest land near town. Campus in modern times is located about a mile north of financial district in downtown Toronto. University of 1817 Charlottesville, Campus was built on land purchased from Virginia VA President James Monroe, who was moving into the White House. University of 1849 Madison, WI State provided 50 acres of land for a main Wisconsin, campus in 1850 after the first class had met Madison for a year at Madison Female Academy. Washington 1853 St. Louis, MO Opened as a night school in downtown St. University Louis. Undergraduate, law, and medical of St. Louis schools were dispersed across city until university bought 103 acres in Forest Park, west of city limits. Yale 1701 New Haven, CT Moved to Saybrook, then Wethersfield and finally to New Haven, its present location in 1716 when that town won out over local competitors to secure campus.

Of course, though these institutions are peers of UCLA in the present day, they were not so in the 1920s: UCLA was not even considered an equal to its parent campus, the University of

California, Berkeley. Yet UCLA was no longer a normal school; its faculty had the ambitions and the campus the potential to be an AAU-caliber university, and so it does not seem overly anachronistic to examine these schools and their campuses here. 19 Leaders of American universities located in cities (mainly private institutions) have historically been restless, always searching for finer locations. This is true today as well, as the proposed expansion of New York

19 The State Normal School of Los Angeles moved once itself, from a location in downtown location to its Vermont Avenue campus in 1914. While campus moves are not a main focus of her study, Christine Ogren provides a wealth of information on the history of state normal schools in her seminal work The American State Normal School: An Instrument of Great Good (New York: Palgrave McMillan, 2005).

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University in Greenwich Village has provoked intense debate. 20 The University of Pennsylvania

("Penn"), for example, operated in central Philadelphia for over a century before moving in 1872 to West Philadelphia, an "area of wide open spaces, more verdant country village than big city." 21 The next decades saw this farmland converted into residences for workers who rode the streetcar trolleys from their little homes to the city and back every day. As long as Philadelphia's industrial economy fared well, these families prospered, and Penn enjoyed the happy bustle of the neighborhoods adjoining it. However, in the 1920s, even as Los Angeles planners envisioned a UCLA easily accessible by streetcar, Penn’s street-car friendly location lost its luster. Prosperity had fled this part of West Philadelphia, and many Penn alumni argued that the campus ought to be moved again, only this time to Valley Forge, a farther flung suburb. Yet in the end, Penn stayed in the city.

Since 1740, Columbia University, located in New York City, has moved from lower

Manhattan to mid-town and then even farther afield to Morningside Heights. In 1876, Johns

Hopkins University was opened in buildings dispersed throughout the city of Baltimore, on the

German university model. Nevertheless, university leaders were forced to respond to demands for greater space, and moved the main campus in 1914 to a large donated estate in North

Baltimore. In contrast, Canadian AAU members McGill University and the University of

Toronto prior to their opening were donated lands in the city centers of Montreal and Toronto, respectively, and were not forced by space pressures to move.

State flagship land-grant universities have not moved as often, mainly because their campus sites were selected by legislatures prior to their opening for business. Ohio State

University and the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign’s histories illustrate this point—

20 Michael Kimmelman. “It Riles a Village,” The New York Times , March 22, 2012. 21 Rudin, 25.

261 each was given ample land at the beginning to support the many missions of a public flagship in the 19 th century. Other state flagships moved early and then remained fixed. For example, the

University of California, Berkeley, moved early in its history from downtown Oakland to

Berkeley, “a town that was mostly a summer refuge for San Franciscans." The Berkeley campus was initially alone, set out in an expanse of open land, but the university has grown in the 140 years since, and “as with most universities, the neighborhoods surrounding UC Berkeley have not welcomed [its] growing presence.” 22 UC Berkeley’s pastoral beginnings set a pattern for the

University of California, as most new campuses, including UCLA in the 1920s and the new

Merced campus in the early 2000s were carved from undeveloped tracts, with the unspoken judgment being that distant neighbors are good neighbors.23

Los Angeles College and Universities’ Historical Examples of Campus Moves

As discussed in this study’s chapter on private colleges and universities, these institutions all moved or seriously considered moving their campuses. USC debated leaving the downtown area but decided to stay and accept a mission as an urban-focused university. Occidental moved several times, as did Loyola College. Caltech remained in its Pasadena location, but attempts were made to link it to a southern branch of the University of California.

UCLA's first campus was comprised of roughly 25 acres located on Vermont Avenue, one block south of Santa Monica Blvd. Los Angeles historically has had a relatively small and contained downtown center, and the Vermont campus in the 1920s was about the same distance from the city center then as the Los Angeles City College campus (which took over the campus) is today--it is four to five miles from campus to Los Angeles City Hall. Of course, this can be a

22 Emily Marthinsen, “Shaping Campus Edges at UC Berkeley.” Places 17 (1), 2005, 42-47, 42, http://escholarship.org/uc/item/02p2k57v . 23 Richard Bender and John Parman, “New Campuses for New Communities: The University and Exurbia.” Places 17 (1), 2005.

262 long four to five miles to drive in today’s Los Angeles traffic. The same could be said of automotive traffic conditions in the 1920s, when traffic downtown was even more congested perhaps than today. When the State Normal School moved from its downtown location where the Los Angeles Central Public Library is today to its Vermont Avenue campus, there were grumbles and complaints about the undeveloped area. In 1914, the Pacific Street Car line came to within three blocks of campus, and on rainy days, the ten-minute walk from train to school was a muddy mess for “the girls attending the local State Normal School,” complained the Los

Angeles Times , with the headline crying, “Girls Lucky if They Have Autos.” 24

However, soon it seemed likely that UCLA would stay at its Vermont Avenue location, which quickly came to be convenient to downtown—a thirty minute car-ride in 1919, and considered at the time a beautiful place, with sweeping lawns, shrubbery, trees, and flowers. The

Vermont Avenue campus’s ten ivy-covered brick buildings had won national landscaping and architectural design awards, and film studios were using it as the setting for their popular movies about college life.25 UCLA Assistant Controller Robert Underhill “was told to go out and buy 15 more acres, which [Underhill] immediately started to buy immediately south of the campus, running down from Monroe Street to Melrose two square blocks…I acquired, I think, 42 out of the 56 lots on the theory that the University was going to stay in that area.” 26 Underhill admitted, though, that the “campus was cramped, the buildings were rather obsolete in many respects.” 27

As early as 1921, a Los Angeles City Planner, Gordon Whitnall, was already arguing that the

Vermont Avenue campus was too small for student demand, and that “1,500 students were

24 “Girls lucky if they have autos: Normal School students are without adequate car service,” Los Angeles Times , December 20, 1914. 25 Los Angeles Times , January 23, 1919. 26 Robert Underhill, Interview with Verne Stadtman, 1967, 98. 27 Underhill, 99-100.

263 turned away from the university last term (Fall 1920) for lack of space.” 28 Whitnall offered to give the University of California 110 acres near Griffith Park, north of downtown Los Angeles, and stated “the city will be glad to take the old [Vermont Avenue] buildings off their hands and use them as high school buildings.” 29 This is very similar to what was actually done only a few years later. By 1925, the student population was 3,000 beyond the planned upper limit, which forced a search for a new campus site. 30 This thrilled Los Angeles, which at this time owed its economic power not to commerce or industry but to real estate speculation. In 1930, Los Angeles had 6 percent of the country's real estate agents and less than 1 percent of its population. 31

First came an idea to merge UCLA, the Huntington Library and the California Institute of

Technology, but this ambitious plan found little support. 32 University of President Campbell then appointed a committee of seventeen concerned citizens, including several from Los

Angeles, including Henry W. O'Melveny, head of a prestigious local law firm, Joseph F. Sartori, a major banker, and Harry Chandler, editor of the Los Angeles Times . The seventeen members are set forth in Table 27 below, with a notation as to their special influence or significance.

28 “University Site Plan Indorsed,” Los Angeles Times, April 21, 1921. 29 Ibid. 30 Hamilton and Jackson, 39. 31 Mansel G. Blackford, The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast 1890-1920 (Columbus, Ohio: The Ohio State University Press, 1993), 92. 32 James R. Martin, The University of California (in Los Angeles): A Resume of the Selection and Acquisition of the Westwood Site . (Los Angeles, 1925), 11.

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Table 27: Committee on Campus Relocation of Southern Branch of University of California 33

Name Significance

President Campbell President of University of California. Harry Chandler Publisher of the Los Angeles Times ; major booster and developer of Los Angeles in the early to mid-1900s. William E. Dunn City attorney of Los Angeles and founder of Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher Law Firm, still major firm in Los Angeles and nationally. Major clients were the big railroads. In 1925, Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher represented the Janss Investment Co. in defending its racially restrictive real estate covenants, the same kind of covenants that restricted Westwood Village to Whites or Caucasians only. Guy C. Earl Jr. Owner of the Los Angeles Herald-Express newspaper; father Guy C. Earl (UC Berkeley Class of 1883) was a Regent at the time William May Major Los Angeles real estate developer, sales agent for Henry Garland Huntington; secured 1932 Olympic Games for Los Angeles through is work on International Olympic Games Committee. Edward Lyman Prominent Los Angeles attorney. Member and past president of Southwest Museum; Vice-President and director of Huntington Library; trustee of Clermont Men’s College. James M. Martin Wrote book in 1925 on selection of campus site. Maynard McFee Los Angeles banker; appointed to board of Los Angeles Trust and Savings Bank when Henry Robinson became its president. Henry McKee President of the Los Angeles Businessmen’s Association. Clinton E. Miller Major Rotarian, UC Berkeley, Class of 1900 Irwin Muma Edward A. Dickson’s college friend from UC Berkeley; toured Westwood site with Dickson two years before it was selected. Henry O’Melveny Founded Graves & O’Melveny Law Firm in 1885, which became O’Melveny & Myers in 1939, its present name. Major law firm in Los Angeles through 20 th century and into the 21 st . Henry M. Robinson Major Los Angeles banker; a Director (along with Joseph Sartori) of the Los Angeles branch of Federal Reserve Bank in San Francisco. President of Los Angeles Trust and Savings Bank. Joseph F. Sartori Major Los Angeles in late 1800s, early 1900s. Founder of Los Angeles Country Club C.F. (Frank) Stern UC Berkeley Class of 1903 Walter K. Tuller Associate at O’Melveny Law Firm, UC Berkeley Class of 1917

Arthur Letts and the Janss Brothers’ Plans for Westwood

33 Hill , 58-59.

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When the committee set to work, it quickly became clear that the Westwood site was the early, consistent favorite for its mild climate and convenient location on the axis of westward development from downtown Los Angeles and down Wilshire Boulevard out to Santa Monica.

Long before any plans had been considered for moving UCLA’s campus, the Janss Company attempted to market its Westwood holdings as another motion picture colony, but could not lure any of the main studios. 34 One of the main problems was that Santa Monica Boulevard bisected their Westwood properties; it represented a psychological north/south barrier to growth, and included an actual traffic barrier as well, as the main street car line from downtown Los Angeles to the Pacific Ocean ran along it. The creation of a college campus north of Santa Monica

Boulevard, indeed, north of Wilshire Boulevard, offered the Janss Company a chance to start fresh in their Westside planning efforts. Since UCLA’s new Westwood campus was expected to enroll six thousand students when it opened, it seemed reasonable that adjacent neighborhoods would become more valuable and prized, and that retail commerce would thrive. A contemporary real estate expert agreed, stating in 1926—three years before the Westwood campus opened, “ [T]here is no question but the present strength of values in the west side districts of the city west from La Brea Avenue can be attributed, in a great extent, to the university project. This is particularly true of the Westwood Hills area adjoining the university site…” 35 Observing this strength in residential land values, the Janss Company studied major urban retail areas across the country and consulted with the director of the Los Angeles Planning

Department, and decided that a shopping district drawn to a modest scale—nothing titanic or

34 Under a byline declaring “Westwood Has Bright Future,” a reporter wrote, “[O]ne of the most valuable assets in Westwood is the coming of the largest motion-picture producers to this community as the location of their million- dollar plants. William Fox, Harold Lloyd, and Christie corporations have announced their intentions of locating in Westwood, with the result that by vox populi it has been named ‘the second Hollywood.’ Other film organizations are bidding for property there, it is understood.” Los Angeles Times , July 27, 1924. The rumored studio moves never took place, and the Janss Company directed their attention elsewhere. 35 Los Angeles Times , April 4, 1926.

266 bloated and unseemly—would bring them lasting value and success in the area. As Richard

Longstreth notes:

Within the first months of planning, Janss appears to have decided that Westwood Village would have an exceptional character. The ensemble would suggest a ‘village’, not a city; it would be cohesive and meet an unusually high architectural standard. Buildings would in effect form a commercial campus that would complement the university’s and be commensurate in terms of expression. Like the university, too, the business village would stand out as a major community asset, not just for the convenience it offered nearby householders but for the atmosphere it conveyed and the stability it brought to the area. The undertaking was strenuously marketed as yet another means to strengthen property values over time—another way to create a guaranteed neighborhood. 36

In 1923, Dickson visited the Westwood site with his old friend Irwin Muma from the

University of California, Berkeley, where they had gone to college together.37 He entered into informal negotiations regarding the site’s acquisition with Arthur Letts, the present owner, and then after Letts’s death in 1923, with Harold Janss (Letts’s son-in-law) and Edwin Janss, who were developing large tracts of West Los Angeles through the Janss Investment Company. 38

Arthur Letts was good friends with George Cochran, a University of California Regent from Los

Angeles.39 Cochran and Letts had met as young men in Toronto, and Cochran had been best man at Letts’s wedding. Later, when Letts had hit hard financial times in Seattle, Cochran convinced him to move to Los Angeles and he co-signed the bank loan that helped start Letts’s chain of

Bullock’s department stores. Letts and Cochran served on the Los Angeles State Normal

School’s Board of Trustees in the years preceding its conversion to a branch campus of the

36 Longstreth, 166. 37 Jackson, California of the Southland , 28; Dickson, 41. 38 Dickson, 43. 39 The other Regents from Southern California at the time were Edward A. Dickson, Joseph F. Sartori and his wife Mrs. Joseph Sartori, and John R. Haynes.

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University of California. 40 When it was located downtown and on Vermont Avenue, Letts had always hoped that the Normal School might move to a new campus on his Westwood property. 41

Shortly after Dickson’s negotiations with the Janss Company, Letts invited University of

California President Campbell to Los Angeles to inspect the Westwood site, which Campbell did along with Comptroller Sproul, Berkeley professor Baldwin Woods, and Edwin Janss.

Afterward, the Janss Company offered the Regents a donation of land (200 acres) for the

University’s use as a new campus. They considered UCLA as "a major stimulus to surrounding development, attracting not just faculty but many persons of means who believed prosperity to an institution of higher learning enhanced land values. Furthermore, the substantial enrollment of 6,000 that was projected for UCLA when it began operating its new campus in 1929 would no doubt accelerate growth of nearby subdivisions.” 42 The University, combined with a planned upper middle class residential area and commercial village, would constitute a "guaranteed neighborhood." Furthermore, the Janss Company's bid contemplated the use of not only 300 prime acres for the university, but also 100 acres adjacent to the campus for faculty houses. The residential areas were in an already ritzy area, as it was adjacent to Bel Air, described in those years as "the hilly area above UCLA …developed by Alphonso Bell in the teens and [which] obviously sold well in the twenties. It is the last word in respectability, having its own security patrol years before other highbrow enclaves felt the need."43

Ocean breezes and pastoral yearnings aside, the Board of Regents chose Westwood for three reasons: location, location, location. The other main contenders were Burbank, Fullerton,

40 Los Angeles State Normal School Bulletin Announcement of Courses, 1913-1914, http://www.registrar.ucla.edu/archive/catalog/13-14catalog.pdf . 41 Greg Fischer, “A Forgotten Downtown Retail Pioneer,” http://www.ladowntownnews.com/arts_and_entertainment/a-forgotten-retail-pioneer/article_855ba520-7f1c-11e4- 9862-9be342605a1b.html . As mentioned in Chapter 4 on private colleges, Letts had tried to lure Occidental College to the area by donating 1,000 acres to it for a new campus. 42 Longstreth, vi. 43 Gebhard, An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles , 131.

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Pasadena, and Palos Verdes, and all but Fullerton were located within fifteen miles of the center of the city's population (the intersection of Central Avenue and Santa Barbara Boulevard, now

Martin Luther King, Jr. Boulevard.) 44 A student explained the tour of the five final sites: "The

Regents came down…and were taken in limousines by the Janss brothers to look at these various sites. The day they took them to Burbank, it was hotter than holy Hades. The day they took them out to the ocean (Palos Verdes) and it was very foggy and cold and wind roaring in.” 45 The myth of a beautiful ocean-fronting Palos Verdes campus has lingered for decades, but Robert

Underhill corrects this notion, “the Palos Verdes site was on the eastern side of the property, It did not face the ocean at all, although it was advocated as a beautiful site. Part of Palos Verdes overlooks the ocean. [The campus site] looked over Watts and the industrial area on the east side.” 46

Westwood ended up being the Goldilocks choice for the Regents, with Burbank having previously failed when floated as an option, Fullerton too far from Los Angeles, Burbank too hot, and Palos Verdes too cold. But Westwood was just right, among the many possible sites listed in Table 28 below.

44 Los Angeles Times , 1925 45 Jackson, 45. 46 Underhill, 107. In the early 1960s, a California State University campus had been planned for the Palos Verdes Estates, intended to serve the well-off communities of the South Bay. The 1965 Watts Riots powerfully concentrated the thinking of both Governor Edmund “Pat” Brown and CSU planners, and the campus location was moved to its present day site in Carson, placed there to best serve African American communities that had long been without a nearby university. http://www.kcet.org/socal/departures/watts/minding-the-gap-the-racial-legacy-of-calstate- university-dominguez-hills.html .

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Table 28: Possible Sites of UCLA Campus Identified in 1924-25 47

Possible Site Location Size (acres) Price ($ per acre)

Schiappa Petra Ranch 5 miles NW of 600 Gift (valued at (City of Oxnard) Oxnard $1,000/acre) City of Los Angeles San Fernando 1,000 $700 City of Burbank Same 400 Gift (total value estimated as $1.5 million) City of E. Whittier Same 640-1,000 $1,000 City of Covina Same 601 Gift (total value estimated as $620,000) City of San Diego Between La Jolla and 1,000 Gift (est. value Torrey Pines, $1,000/acre) overlooking Scripps Biological Institute City of Riverside Same 772 State Property City of Monrovia Bradbury Ranch 1,100 No price given. Palos Verdes Hills Same 1,000 $500 City of Alhambra Same 600 Gift City of Hollywood Same 300 acres No price given City of Fullerton and Bastanchury Ranch 1,000 Gift (total value Orange County estimated over $2 million) City of Santa Ana Alisos Ranch 1,000-1,600 acres Gift West Los Angeles Letts Property 383 acres $2,000 City of Santa Barbara Same Not given Not given City of Owensmouth Same Not given Not given City of Pasadena Bradbury Estate 400 Not given City of Chino Pacific Colony 800 Not given City of San Fernando San Fernando Blvd. 600-700 Not given between two main reservoirs *sites in bold and italics are the five finalist sites identified by the Committee of Seventeen.

The Regents assumed their property values would consistently rise, being so near to

Beverly Hills and the new Wilshire Boulevard. 48 Also, UCLA would be adjacent to Bel Air,

47 Richard K. Nystrom UCLA: An Interpretation Considering Architecture and Site, (University of California, Los Angeles: unpublished dissertation, 1968); “Scores of Sites for University,” Los Angeles Times , January 16, 1925, A10.

270 already an enclave for the wealthy. The new campus location was considered a step up in prestige, with more beautiful scenery and more luxurious lifestyles awaiting. In the first student yearbook published on the new Westwood campus, glossy photos illustrate the selling points of this new paradise, with captions stating “Mountains gaze across the campus to the sea spread out below”; and “like the hub of a gigantic wheel, the new location lies within a circle encompassing the beauty of rugged mountains, the animation of a busy city, the lure of sandy beaches and the quiet charm of Catalina”; and “country clubs and beaches will solve the problem of idle afternoons”; and “from toboggan slides to bridle paths, every inclination can be satisfied.” 49

Then, as today, Los Angeles residents referred to distance in terms of travel time, not miles. Accordingly, all were impressed that the new campus was "within 20 minutes of the present location of the Southern Branch on Vermont [Avenue.]" 50 At this time, most UCLA students (85 percent) lived at home. 51 The Regents assumed most UCLA students would later live in the Westwood area, observing "the growth of the residence section of Los Angeles is westward toward the ocean and Santa Monica." 52 While Santa Monica, Venice, and Beverly

Hills were expected to offer bond measures assisting UCLA's relocation, Culver City (only several miles farther south of Westwood than Venice) was thought too far afield. The Regents argued "other things being equal the new site ought to be in the western end of Los Angeles where it could be reached by the mass of students actually attending the University without

48 University of California Board of Regents Reports, 1925-26. ( Committee on Sites for the Southern Branch of the University Administrative Files Record Series Number 3). Department of Special Collections, University Archives, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, 1926. 49 Southern Campus , Vol. 11 (Los Angeles, 1930). 50 Regents, 1926. Today, according to Google Maps, traveling by automobile from L.A. City College to Royce Hall on UCLA’s Westwood campus is estimated to take 29 minutes in light traffic, along Santa Monica and Sunset Boulevard, and it is a 31 minute trip taking US 101 North and I-405 South. 51 Martin, 12. 52 Ibid.

271 unnecessary loss of time of unnecessary expense." 53 They assumed UCLA students would live in or near western Los Angeles, stating "the growth of the residence section of Los Angeles is westward toward the ocean and Santa Monica,” giving little thought to students from the southern or central parts of the city or to East Los Angeles. 54 However, in the previous year, the

University’s consultants Frederick Law Olmstead and Harland Bartholomew had found that “the population of the city is filling into the southward faster than to the north or west,” and that “this was to be expected as there [were] greater undeveloped areas to the south of the city.” 55 The

Vermont Avenue campus in 1925 was “six miles north and west of the real center of population.” 56 The major contending new campus sites—Palos Verdes, Fullerton, Burbank, and

Westwood—were all found to be roughly equally near to most of the population of Los

Angeles. 57 Olmstead and Bartholomew reported,

University authorities tell us that the students…do not come in the greatest number from either the ultra-rich population, such as is found in the northwest part of the city, nor from the least well-to-do, such as live in Belvedere Gardens district to the northeast, but rather from the great middle class who have established their homes to the greatest extent in the southern part of the metropolitan area. 58

However, none of the main contending relocation sites were located in the southern areas where

Olmstead and Bartholomew expected the most growth.

By 1910, the red streetcars of the Pacific Electric Railway System knit together the L.A. metropolitan area from Long Beach to Santa Monica to San Bernardino, and in 1924, reached a high of 109 million passengers. Theresa Rustemeyer Long chose to attend UCLA in 1921 over

53 University of California Board of Regents Reports 1925-26. Committee on Sites for the Southern Branch of the University Administrative Files (Record Series Number 3). Department of Special Collections, University Archives, Charles E. Young Research Library, UCLA, 1926 54 Ibid. 55 Los Angeles Times , February 8, 1925. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Los Angeles Times , February 8, 1925. Exact center of population in 1925 was found to be near intersection of Santa Barbara Avenue (renamed in 1983 to Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Blvd.) and Central Avenue.

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the objections of her mother, explaining, "I could go to the university (UCLA) on the street car

from home, and I was only 16." 59 The proposed campus location was walking distance from the

Pacific Electric streetcar line and all assume that Pacific Electric would build a branch line to the

new campus—but it never did. 60

Automobiles were not yet the dominant mode of transportation, though they were fast

approaching it--the number of registered cars jumped from 141,000 to 777,000 during the

decade. 61 After a decade of operation, UCLA led the nation's universities in the number of automobiles used by students, according to a 1929 survey taken on and adjacent to the new

Westwood campus. 62 Car parking on campus, so vexing a problem that it became a Bob Hope punch line in the 1970s:—"it takes four years to get through UCLA, or five if you park in Lot

32"—was not yet considered a major concern. 63 The Janss Company did not foresee the great

need for parking for their customers either, and “as early as 1932, parking space was said to be at

a premium.” 64 Businesses struggled to find parking spots for their employees: only a few of the larger stores such as Bullock’s had their own lots, and the Janss Company took no action to

59 Theresa R. Long, Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985 / interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, 2000, 427. 60 Santa Monica Evening Outlook , March 21, 1925. 61 Mark S. Foster, "The Decentralization of Los Angeles During the 1920s"(Ph.D. dissertation, University of Southern California, 1971), 143. 62 Southern Campus , 1930. The survey, conducted by Alpha Delta Sigma, the national advertising fraternity, was taken at 10 o'clock in the morning on Wednesday, October 9, 1929. The researchers found "2,384 automobiles parked along the street near the campus and in the parking allotments. Of this number, 349 were touring cars, 589 were roadsters, 648 were sedans, and 798 were coupes…978 of the vehicles were Fords--50 percent were new models--352 were Chevrolets, 148 were Buicks, 116 were Dodges, there were 106 Studebakers, 94 Chryslers were included, and 86 were of Essex make." Los Angeles denizens have always been fond of cars, goes the cliché, and this affection does emanate from historical records like the above. 63 Today, in its total number of parking spaces (25,169) UCLA is only surpassed by Texas A&M University (36,963) and Ohio State University (32,000). Donald Shoup, “The Politics and Economics of Parking on Campus,” in Stephen Ison and Tom Rye (eds.), Transport Demand Management Measures: An International Perspective , (Burlington, Vermont: Ashgate Publishing, 2008), 121–149, 122. 64 Longstreth, 174.

273 alleviate the parking problems. 65 Westwood’s most pernicious dilemma, a lack of parking spaces, flared up after the Second World War and continues to the present. 66

UCLA’s rapid shift in the 1920s from a streetcar commuter college to an automobile commuter college had long-term consequences that are felt even today. UCLA administrators faced the policy consequences of changed geographic realities in later years, especially during the school’s first serious efforts to recruit students of color. In the Fall semester of 1968, UCLA students of color participating in the Educational Opportunities Program (“EOP”) were surveyed, and many stated a main reason they assumed they would not attend UCLA was because of the campus location: most lived far from Westwood, and "public transportation [was] notoriously bad in the Los Angeles area." 67 And still is today.

Regents Decide on Westwood

Students championed various sites: as John Jackson remembers, “when a new campus was talked about, the students were right in there… some of them wanted to be in Burbank, others where Santa Anita is now…there was a possibility that we would combine with Cal Tech, but that was rather far-fetched…and down by the cliffs in Playa del Rey." 68 Further, Jackson recalled, students campaigned strenuously in support of the 1925 ballot measures that authorized the raising of bonds by the Cities of Los Angeles, Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, and Venice.69 In particular the students promoted “a film which showed the terrible fate of the boy who couldn’t go to college because the family didn’t have a lot of money and the mother was sad. It was pretty corny, but the point was that he couldn’t go way up to Berkeley or to somewhere five

65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 174-175. 67 George Nash, The University and the City . A Report Prepared for The Carnegie Commission on Higher Education (New York: McGraw-Hill Book Company, 1973). 68 Hamilton and Jackson, 158. 69 Nystrom, 46.

274 hundred miles away or to USC with a big tuition, so he couldn’t go to college…they got theaters all over town to run the film—it was only ten minutes—and after the feature they’d stick this thing on, or before.” 70 The film, College Days , shows a family distraught at being separated when the son and daughter are forced to choose among far flung schools such as Harvard,

Vassar, Yale, or Berkeley, but they are saved by the bonds issue that allowed the building of an enlarged UCLA campus. 71 Acting on the advice of William Fox, head of the Fox Film Company, high school students and UCLA students gave presentations prior to “College Days” being shown. 72

On January 15, 1925, representatives of cities from Oxnard to San Diego made their pitch for their areas to have the new southern branch campus. Henry O’Melveny presided as chairman of the Sites Committee, which met in the board room of the Security Trust and Savings Bank

(which had been founded in 1888 by Joseph F. Sartori, one of the University Regents from Los

Angeles). Literally sitting in a center of Los Angeles’s financial power, the representatives of far-flung sites in San Diego and Ventura Counties must have wondered how they could persuade a room full of Los Angeles partisans to hand such a valuable prize to them. Nevertheless, the Los

Angeles Times reported, “there was applause when he [O’Melveny] urged the many communities which were bound to be disappointed not to cherish resentment but to sink all factional difference in a united effort to seize a great opportunity for the Southland.” 73 This new campus seemed a great opportunity for these municipalities and counties but for businesses as well. The

Westwood plan must have impressed the Security Trust and Savings Bank present at work that

70 Hamilton and Jackson, 159. 71 Ibid. 72 Dundjerski, 41. 73 Los Angeles Times , January 16, 1925, Page A-10.

275 day, for they were one of two banks to open branches in the new Westwood Village, one of the first dozen businesses in operation. 74

The Janss Company Markets Westwood Area with New University Campus

Though it is hard to imagine from the Los Angeles of today’s dense urban environment, the Janss Investment Company promoted the area in the mid-1920s as a retreat from the din and dust of the center city:

Enclosed gardens are a part of our heritage from the Spanish-Mexican days of old California. Those who have enjoyed the incomparable atmospheric conditions of this area will tell you of nights of delightful rest, undisturbed by the clang of traffic signals or the shriek of sirens. They will tell you of breathing air fresh from the Pacific, of freedom from carbon monoxide gas, generated by the thousands of automobiles in the congested areas. 75

Edward Dickson’s Evening Express newspaper (owner and editor from 1919 to 1931) promoted Westwood Village by showing the great value of its location adjacent to the new branch campus of the University of California:

The tradition which lingers about the famous old college towns is priceless. The alumni of our great universities regard the homes of their student days with reverence and return to them in later years as pilgrims to a sacred shrine. Back to Cambridge, New Haven, and to Princeton they trek year after year and there find the campus they knew of yore. There, the greensward seems greener, the trees more friendly, the skies more blue, and the sun brighter. The ancient halls of learning draw them as a magnet year after year. Precious memories are awakened, old friendships renewed. Take Harvard from Cambridge, Yale from New Haven or “Old Nassau” from Princeton and you’ve taken the jewel from the crown. These great institutions identify their community to millions the world over who otherwise would know or care little about it. This is precisely what the new University of California group will do to Westwood Hills. 76

While the bane of the college town is the constant turnover of students arriving and leaving after a few years, bringing the problems of a transient population, Westwood was intended to be a stable area, with families raising their children at local schools and intending to send them to the

74 Citizens National Trust and Savings Bank was the other bank to open a branch in Westwood Village in 1929. John Steven McGroarty, A Year and a Day: Westwood Village, Westwood Hills . 1930. Reprint. (London: Forgotten Books, 2013), 12. 75 Ibid. 76 Richard E. Bloomer, “What the University of California Means to Westwood Hills.” https://westwoodhillspropertyowners.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/westwood-village-janss-investment-corporation- brochure-ca-1-1928.pdf .

276 college at UCLA. 77 A Westwood promoter purred, “the incomparable school facilities of

Westwood Hills will enable your children to make invaluable social contacts.” 78 There was little need to be anxious about typical college town nuisances, as “the business, apartment, sorority, and fraternity areas are carefully segregated and all of these buildings are subjected to rigid restrictions as to cost and architecture.” 79 Westwood was portrayed as simply idyllic: “to live in

Westwood Hills is live in the midst of beauty and to enjoy the society of neighbors whose cultural ideals are the same as your own. Carefully drawn restrictions safeguard the entire property for periods ranging from twenty to fifty years.” 80

The Janss Company had been including “carefully drawn restrictions” in its real estate sale contract for a decade prior to Westwood’s opening: this is how they ensured their developments remained closed to all but White people. Each of their real estate contracts for sale included this paragraph: "No part of said real property shall ever be leased, rented, sold or conveyed to any person who is not of the White or Caucasian race, nor be used or occupied by any person who is not of the White or the Caucasian race whether grantee hereunder or any other person." 81 In Janss Investment Co. v. Walden , 196 Cal. 753 [239 P. 34], which was decided in

August, 1925, in the same year the University of California awarded its branch campus to the

Janss’s Westwood Hills site, the Supreme Court of California unanimously upheld its 1919 decision in Los Angeles Investment Co. v. Gary , 181 Cal. 680, finding that clauses restricting sale of property to people of a certain race were legal, and that if these clauses were violated by sale

77 Near a century later, a criticism of UCLA is that it fails to enroll enough students from the city of Los Angeles. At the Mar Vista Community Day festival, a parent of a Venice High School student, on hearing that the author attended UCLA, immediately and bitterly assailed UCLA for seemingly admitting fewer students from the local high schools than the University of Michigan did. “Michigan recruits the area better than UCLA, and I’m a UCLA alum,” she grumbled. 78 McGroarty, 10. 79 Ibid. 80 Ibid. 81 Scott Kurashige, The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010), 28.

277 to a person from a prohibited race, that the sale was forfeit and the property would revert to the previous owner. 82 Point for point, the facts of Janss Investment Co. v. Walden matched the situation from the earlier Gary case. In 1922, the Janss Investment Company sold a real estate parcel to a White man, James Henry Walden, who the next day transferred his ownership to

Betty Walling and her husband, both African American, who took possession and were living on the property when the Janss Company sued Walden to enforce the racially restrictive clause set forth above. At the trial court, the Los Angeles Superior Court, the Janss Company, represented by Gibson, Dunn, and Crutcher, which is today still one of the most important law firms in Los

Angeles, and which had two of its attorneys acting in their own private capacities on the

Southern Branch Site Selection Committee, defeated Walden and the Wallings, who then lost on their appeal to the California Supreme Court.

With the highest court in California upholding these racially restrictive covenants, no students of color or their families (or University employees or people working in Westwood

Village) could legally own or rent out property in Westwood Village. As the University of

California operated no dormitories at this time, UCLA was purely a commuter school. The racially exclusionary covenants practiced by the Janss Company (and many other real estate companies and other landlords) ensured that people of color would have a long commute to campus. In 1948, the United States Supreme Court struck down racially restrictive covenants in the landmark Shelley v. Kraemer case, yet the damaging impact, and lasting racial prejudice lingered on for decades, which has not helped UCLA in its efforts to promote access and equity for students of all racial and ethnic backgrounds. 83

Faculty Housing Dead-end

82 Janss Investment Co. v. Walden , 196 Cal. 753 [239 P. 34] 83 Shelley v. Kraemer , 334 U.S. 1 (1948).

278

The Janss Company promised the Regents sites that would be made available for faculty housing, a crucial concession considering the high real estate prices associated with Westwood, adjacent to Bel-Air. According to Joseph Sartori, President of Security Trust and Savings Bank,

University President Campbell had demanded the faculty housing concession and so Alphonso

Bell sold 100 acres in the hills above Bel Air in order to pay for 75 acres next to the campus site, so that professors would be able to buy lots near campus. 84 As Robert Underhill recalled,

The reason for the faculty home sites was that it was going to be an expensive area. There was no questions about that…[but] they wanted the faculty near the campus. [The faculty members] that lived down near the old Vermont Avenue campus that was nine miles away and pretty inconvenient and I think they were pretty sure that the faculty wouldn’t be able to afford the lots and the kind of buildings that might be restricted by some outsider and the university could, perhaps, develop it. 85

Professors would not be permitted to purchase land, because it had been granted to the Regents by the cities of Los Angeles, Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, and Venice with the deeds restricted so that it could only be used for educational purposes. However, faculty members would be able to buy and sell houses built on the land, and sign 99-year leases allowing them to live there—the same legal mechanism used by Stanford University for its “faculty ghetto.” The lands reserved for faculty houses were located on the northern border of the new campus on what is today called

Sunset Boulevard, and offered a buffer zone between non-university homeowners and the campus. The houses were never built, though blueprints had been drawn up, and utility lines and street planned. Professors proved swift to relocate west from their homes near the old campus but slow to move to the faculty housing area. Robert Underhill explained, “it wasn’t quite sure that everybody wanted to live on a ‘army post’ so the matter was dropped.” 86 Bernice Park, a UCLA student at the time, recalled, “the faculty in the early days were all seeking houses as UCLA

84 Santa Monica Evening Outlook , May 8, 1925. 85 Underhill, 131. 86 Ibid.

279 moved into Westwood. Sundays you would find the faculty members roaming over the hills, which were completely bare in most of Westwood—they had a few grasses and wildflowers on them and that was about all—looking at lots and looking at homes. 87 Park’s recollections of professors’ swift moves seems accurate; a comparison of faculty and staff home addresses for the last year on the old campus and the first year on the new one shows that at least half of these people changed their home addresses to places closer to Westwood. 88 “Even then,” remembered

Park, “Westwood houses for young professors were sort of out of range.” 89 Therefore, one of the main assumptions regarding the decision to grant the new campus to the Westwood site, that faculty would live in houses adjacent to it, was for the most part left unrealized.

It could not have been surprising to the University community that Westwood would be too expensive for many professors and other workers to buy houses, or for students to find affordable rentals. The Janss Company intended their Westwood development, from Sunset

Boulevard to the north to Pico Boulevard to the south, to fit peoples’ aspirations more than their wallets. Westwood, like Gaul, would be divided into three parts, with the following ranges of intended property values as seen in Table 29 below:

Table 29: Westwood Hills Sections’ Planned Land Values as Planned by Janss Co.

Section Proposed Price Range of Lot

Pico Blvd. to Santa Monica Blvd. $6,000-$10,500 Santa Monica Blvd. to Wilshire Blvd. $9,500-$18,500 North of Wilshire Blvd. $18,500-$250,000

Student Housing Difficulties and Importance of Sororities

87 Park, 577. 88 University of California at Los Angeles, Campus Directory , 1928-29 and 1929-30. 89 Park, 577.

280

In the 1930s, campus and village blurred into each other. There were no dormitories yet on campus, so many students lived in the Village, often above gas stations and other businesses. 90 When the Regents of the University of California accepted the Westwood site, they did so assuming that Janss Company’s adjacent village would include housing for students ad that the adjacent neighborhoods would have sites set aside for faculty housing. 91 The main buildings in Westwood Village, such as the Janss Dome and the Holmby Clock Tower were built to house student dormitories in the upper stories, but no students ever lived there. 92 Ruth

Rader Baldwin recalled, “housing was a very difficult problem. Here you were in the middle of a big barley field surrounded by the most expensive property—Bel-Air, Holmby Hills—and no place for a student to live except in the sororities or fraternities. Everyone was scrambling not only to get transportation to the campus but trying to find a reasonable place to live.” 93

Greek organizations served a critical student need—housing—especially following the move to Westwood. Dean McHenry commented that Greek organizations “provided housing in a university that had very little tradition for providing housing. Regent Dickson regarded university housing as socialism. I don’t think that’s an exaggeration…it [university housing] was objected to at Berkeley too. They [fraternities and sororities] did provide housing. They had national and other funds available, and they built houses out there, and it helped.” 94

Sororities helped to provide housing for a large number of UCLA women students, especially beginning in the late 1920s in the large new houses constructed along Hilgard Avenue in the campus in Westwood. As UCLA’s sorority chapters were all relatively new, all having

90 Ann Sumner, “Distinguished Alumna: Ann Sumner.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1970-71 by Winston Wutkee. Collection 300/318 (Los Angeles: Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles, 1977). 91 O.W. Van Patten, “Westwood: the Case of the Bartered Bride.” Los Angeles Times , October 26, 1969. 92 Ibid., 27. 93 Baldwin, 73. 94 McHenry, 132.

281 been created after 1919, there were no local older graduates to help guide the sorority members in their efforts to secure land for their houses near the new campus. So at times, the students negotiated for themselves. Before any part of the new campus had been built, a Janss Company representative took Eleanor Lloyd Dees to visit the site to select a spot for her sorority house. As

Dees recalled,

We got out of the car and had to walk through weeds and brush…which I was used to, because I had spent a lot of time in the old cattle ranch that my grandfather had acquired in Ventura County. But it was just the same thing…you’d expect to see cattle come up over the ridge any minute.

She said “now we must walk to a pepper tree…if you get to the pepper tree, that is right in front of where Hilgard is going to be…I asked her “Now, what lot on your map will be the closest to the main building where most of the students would have their classes?” She showed it to me, and we were standing almost on it. And I said, “Well, I’m sure Alpha Gamma Delta will want that lot, so please put us down for that lot”…She said, “I’m a Gamma Phi Beta and I’m holding that for my sorority, although I’ve never been a student at Southern Branch.” [So] she put us down for lot two…suffice it to say that is where the chapter house is today, and that’s how things happened in 1927. 95

The path was relatively smooth for sororities to purchase ground for their houses, as the

Janss Company “offered to sell twenty-eight housing lots of Hilgard Avenue to Greek organizations, priced from $7,500 to $9,500, below the standard asking price to non-Greek buyers of $8,000 to $12,000.” 96 From 1929 to 1939, 21 White sororities bought lots. By 1938,

Chi Alpha Delta, having saved money from member dues and receiving help from Japanese investors, tried to buy a house on Hilgard. The University Religious Conference building would have been sold to them, as UCLA was amenable, but the Janss Company shot it down. Non- citizens like Japanese immigrants (who were not permitted to become naturalized citizens) could not hold real property then, and would not be able to until 1956. Native-born Japanese American students, from the Nisei generation, were blocked from holding property by racially restrictive

95 Dees, 184. 96 Lim, 20.

282 covenants and red-lined mortgages. 97 Not able to buy a house, the Chi Alpha Deltas were relegated to being permanent commuter students, often meeting in Boyle Heights, miles from campus. 98 Mabel Ota explains, “So you can see why the girls felt a need to band together. We were really excluded. The sorority gave the girls a feeling of belonging.” 99

The Janss Company allowed many different architects to design buildings in the village, yet the two buildings owned by their own company were designed by Allison & Allison, the firm that was designing UCLA’s Westwood campus. 100 Whether or not the University of California sought to be tied to Westwood Village, in an architectural sense they were bound from the beginning through the imagination of the planners at Allison & Allison and the Janss Investment

Company.

In the 1930s, despite the ravages of the Great Depression, Westwood Village “proved among the most successful ventures in the commercial expansion of Los Angeles during the interwar decades”: there were 34 businesses in operation on opening day in 1929, and ten years later, there were 452 businesses open. 101 The first years were a painful struggle, and according to a Janss employee and UCLA alumna:

…with the stock crash coming one month after the opening of school, no company could have survived except the Janss Investment Company, with $20 million, because you could shoot a cannonball down the street and not hit a customer. There was allowed only one of everything: one dentist, one gas station, one lawyer, one businessman of a certain type, because [otherwise] they could not survive. For three years it was held to one of each. 102

97 Lim, 21. 98 Ibid. Even after World War II, a reconstituted Chi Alpha Delta was still unable to buy a sorority house in Westwood, as housing prices had soared too high. 99 Ibid., 20. 100 For a detailed analysis of Allison & Allison’s designs for school and college campuses, please see Sally Sims Stokes, “In A Climate Like Ours: The California Campuses of Allison & Allison,” California History 84 (4), (Fall 2007), 26-65. 101 Longstreth, 166. 102 Baldwin, 63.

283

When the Depression eased somewhat in the mid-1930s, the Village attracted a diverse mix of businesses, ranging from local department stores such as Desmond’s, Bullock’s and

Meyer Siegel, grocery supermarkets still in their infancy such as Ralphs, Safeway, and A&P, cosmetic stores like Lila Mae Box De Lux 103 , nationwide department stores including Sears and

J.C. Penney, and banks, utility companies, a storage facility, a bowling alley. 104 And of course, movie theaters. Films have hosted their debut screenings on the red carpet in Westwood Village from the 1930s on, though the number of theaters still in operation has plummeted in recent years. 105 Finally, a few businesses moved from the old Vermont Avenue campus to Westwood

Village, and others for the first time took the opportunity to seek the business of UCLA students, staff, and faculty. A review of business advertisements in the back pages of the UCLA yearbooks for the 1928-29 academic year (the last year on the Vermont Avenue campus) and the

1929-30 academic year (the first year on the new Westwood campus) showed that roughly half of the businesses (14 out of 27) kept their yearbook advertisements from 1929 to 1930, and that of these fourteen, only two had moved their locations to Westwood Village in time for the opening of the new campus. The major book store serving UCLA’s campus, Bob Campbell’s

Book Store, announced in the 1929 yearbook: “Again, we’re neighbors. Another ‘University

Institution’ Moves to Westwood.” 106 The following year, Campbell’s displayed a photo of its new Westwood store in operation, but also advertised its former location as “the old store” on

Vermont Avenue, “now serving L.A.J.C.” 107 Ralph Bunche worked at the old store, and when he

103 “Beauty in Westwood Village,” Santa Monica Evening Outlook , November 24, 1929. 104 Longstreth, 167. 105 Westwood Village once had as many as 18 movie theaters, while today it only has three. http://blogs.kcrw.com/whichwayla/2013/11/photos-westwood-then-and-now . 106 Southern Campus , 1928-29. 107 Southern Campus , 1929-30. “L.A.J.C.” refers to Los Angeles Junior College, which is referred to elsewhere in this paper as Los Angeles City College or LACC.

284 moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts to attend Harvard, Campbell referred him for a job to his friend who ran Harvard’s main bookstore. As Rowe Rader Baldwin tells the story,

“Bob Campbell had never mentioned that Bunche was a Black man. [The shopkeeper] wasn’t sure what he saw when Bunche walked in the door. He was a little amazed, since there were very few Black men at Harvard at that time. But Ralph Bunche turned out to be such a very fine person that he was indeed delighted that Bob Campbell had arranged for him to be a clerk in the store at Harvard.” 108 This story illustrates two main points; the first being that it seems the

Vermont Avenue campus location might have been more open to African Americans working and perhaps living there, too; the second, that the Cambridge shopkeeper was so pleasantly surprised that Bunche was “such a very fine person.” Perhaps Bob Campbell, working in his Los

Angeles store, was more accustomed to diversity than his Harvard counterpart.

The campus speakeasy saloon—on its face a malted milk shop—also moved from the old campus to Westwood. 109 Even after Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Westwood Village did not launch into debauchery: “the Jansses were very mindful of their commitment to Regent

Dickson—this was to be a pure college town. Nothing more than beer could be bought within one mile, and not even beer at first.” 110 When the Village and UCLA's new campus opened together in the fall of 1929, but all was not yet in order in the village: Rowe Rader Baldwin recalled, “Everything was in confusion. There were ditches everywhere. There was mud. You hopped from one side of Westwood Village to the other by planks. The dust was thick. The

108 Baldwin, 117. 109 Goldstone, 54. The business was run by Tom Crumpler, who kept a back room upstairs at his shop. Crumpler served bourbon in the back room. 110 Van Patten, 27.

285 people didn’t know where to go. Students were wandering around trying to get something to eat.

It was just a mess.”111

Westwood Village’s businesses depended on the university and supported it, but village/campus tensions developed. School spirit-type activities, which seemed wholesome and helpful to Village businessmen, were encouraged. Local shop owner Joe Valentine, who ran the popular Desmond’s Bookstore, selling students textbooks and supplies and employing them as clerks, ardently supported the Homecoming Parade that snaked through the Village each fall. 112

However, other campus activities, such as political protests, were not looked on as kindly by

Valentine and his fellow shopkeepers.

If UCLA’s students were at all “red” in their politics, then the surrounding communities and businesses were not; they were conservative in the 1920s and 1930s. While the university administration did not officially coordinate with these local residents, the following anecdote from a Westwood merchant’s oral history illustrates the power of such informal ties that did exist. According to Strack, the UCLA student government had decided to stop splitting receipts of the Cal/UCLA football game with the American Legion and had sent a pacifist speaker to a

Legion meeting to represent UCLA. When campus political unrest simmered one day, the manager of the one of the Village’s first businesses (also a First World War veteran) came on to campus with his American Legion buddies to help cool things off. 113

Colonel [Perry L.] Miles was in charge of the ROTC (Reserve Officers Training Corp) at UCLA, an army man. So my acquaintance with him was very, very strong only because I was trying to support the [ROTC] unit. One day he called me. He said, “Joe, come over.” So I came over. There was a fellow by the name of Bieberman…He was preaching, preaching nothing else but radicalism to these young people. He was on the hill on the

111 Baldwin, 82. 112 Dundjerski, 39. 113 Joe Valentine, Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985 / interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young (Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, 2000), 1.

286

other side, where all the offices are now…in Murphy Hall. So I said, ‘All right.” I said, “ I can get my [American] Legion group, and we’ll get rid of him. He said, “No, that’s the wrong way to do it. The way I want you to do it is to laugh him off. Laugh. Take about five, six guys, put them in different places, and every time he talks, laugh. Laugh so you don’t have to fight or anything. So we did that, and with success. 114

The Displaced

Prior to the Second World War, Japanese farmers “dominated in commercial truck crops” and were “undeniably a significant factor in making California one of the greatest farming states in the Union.” 115 They produced “between thirty and thirty-five percent of all commercial truck crops grown in California.” 116 It is possible that because of discriminatory laws such as the Alien

Land Law of 1920 (which barred Japanese aliens from owning or leasing agricultural land in

California) Japanese farmers preferred truck farming. 117118 As Ruth Rader Baldwin recalled,

Before the construction started in the Village for the Janss Building and for the Holmby building…the area had been leased to the Japanese gardeners for truck gardening. And Westwood Village—the ground—grew the most beautiful beefsteak tomatoes, because all of the topsoil from all of the surrounding hills washed down into the Village. The Japanese gardeners were so upset when the Village was staked out. And I was there when the last crop of beefsteak tomatoes was taken off of the Village land. The Japanese gardeners were just wringing their hands saying “Oh [it is] such a shame to put buildings on such fertile soil where everything grew so beautifully.” 119

There are few if any other mentions in newspaper articles on the campus move, oral histories, or campus records of the loss suffered by the truck farmers. One particularly blind spot in university institutional histories is regarding the history of the former place the campus has taken. Pastoral college campuses have replaced equally pleasant other pastoral settings.

114 Ibid. 115 Masakazu Iwata, “The Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture,” Agricultural History 36 (1) (January 1962), 25-37. 116 Ibid. 117 Robert Higgs, “Landless by Law: Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture to 1941 ,” Journal of Economic History 38 (1) (March 1978), 205-225. 118 Truck farming of course “would enable [Japanese farmers] to move on short notice…and required a minimum of capital investment for permanent structures and perennial crops.” Poli and Warren M. Engstrand, "Japanese Agriculture on the Pacific Coast," Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics, 21 (Nov. 1945), 352-364, 355. 119 Baldwin, 81.

287

The Campus Left Behind

The Vermont Avenue campus immediately became the site of Los Angeles Junior

College, the forerunner of present-day Los Angeles City College.120 Immediately is not too strong a description for the change; the new Director of LACC, William Henry Snyder, battled

UCLA’s movers over sticks of furniture, carpets, and all other movables in the summer of

1929. 121 The transition was made even more awkward by the fact that UCLA summer session classes took place that summer on the Vermont Avenue campus. In the fall of 1929, just as the

New York Stock Exchange was crashing, UCLA opened for business on its new Westwood campus and LACC began operations on Vermont Avenue. Los Angeles was the third California city, following Fresno and Santa Barbara to adopt junior college programs; its first, Hollywood

Junior College, opened in 1911 on Hollywood High School’s campus. At the time, Los Angeles had four public high schools: Los Angeles (“LA High”), offering a comprehensive course,

Polytechnic, centering on a science curriculum, Manual Arts, a vocational education-focused school, and Hollywood, which offered a general liberal arts education. Each of these high schools hosted a junior college on its campus in the 1910s and 1920s, yet all were failures for the most part; Polytechnic, Manual Arts, and Hollywood never enrolled more than 200 students in their junior colleges. As Director Snyder explained, “when a high school student graduated and wanted to go on to college, college meant a new environment, and if he stayed right on…he didn’t feel as if her were going to college, and it didn’t catch on.” 122 Yet Los Angeles Junior

College, housed on LA High’s campus, proved relatively popular, enrolling as many as 431

120 Los Angeles Junior College was officially renamed Los Angeles City College in 1938. 121 James Norwood Cox, “Urban community college : a case study of Los Angeles City College from 1929 to 1970,” an unpublished dissertation (Los Angeles: University of California, Los Angeles, 1970), 122. 122 Ibid., 123.

288 students in a semester. 123 This boded well for its new operations on Vermont Avenue, especially considering the convenient location of UCLA’s former campus: “[W]ithin easy walking distance were the lines of buses and lurching street cars and the interurban trains that went singing out to the San Fernando Valley. For a million and a quarter residents, the campus was, at most, 45 minutes and a seven cents’ fare away from home.” 124 Enrollments grew from 1,300 to 4,500 by

1933 and hit a pre-World War II high water mark of 6,200 students. Director Snyder had certainly worked hard to ensure the new college’s success, as his son-in-law Dean McHenry remembered: “he was there on the Vermont Avenue campus all summer persuading university people that they didn’t really need to take that piece of equipment with them…the family joke in the Snyder family is that he sometimes pulled the tags off things that were destined for

Westwood so they’d leave them there so he could start classes in September.” 125

The “street cars and the interurban trains” had stopped operating by the 1960s, but even then, forty years after LACC’s opening, forty percent of the students were commuting to campus by public transportation as the college enjoyed a lasting geographical advantage in attracting applicants from the downtown core neighborhoods. The award-winning campus, lined with vine- covered red brick buildings, changed physically almost immediately—the 1933 Long Beach

Earthquake wrecked two buildings and the other structures “survived only because they were held together by the climbing ficus vines that enmeshed them,” goes the campus legend. 126

UCLA departing Vermont Avenue must have triggered a similar earthquake, less severe in the short run, more deeply felt in later years. The faculty, staff, and student body of a burgeoning

123 Ibid., 41. 124 Ibid., 124. 125 McHenry, 29. 126 Cox, 33.

289 research university—an entire professional class—left en masse , replaced by roughly the same number of people, but not the same amount of ready cash or earning potential.

Conclusion

The University of California and the Janss Investment Company entered into a tacit understanding that UCLA would the first major university constructed directly along with and adjacent to a privately held college town, Westwood, comprising expensive residential areas and fine retail establishments. With racially restrictive covenants keeping Westwood’s residences and business owned by Whites only, and with housing in the area relatively expensive because of its proximity to Bel Air and Holmby Hills, UCLA ensured that during its early years at its new

Westwood campus, it would be a largely commuter institution attended mainly by White students. The close relationship between gown and town has ended, and today UCLA is ever more a residential campus, offering every possible amenity to its students; it is a community unto itself and seeks this as an institutional goal. For Westwood Village, “merchants and business people now see LeConte Avenue, at the school’s southern entrance, as a sort of concrete curtain” and it seems less fitting than ever to label the village a college town. 127

127 Jim Heimann, “Building on the Past for a Future Westwood,” Los Angeles Times , December 26, 1999, http://articles.latimes.com/1999/dec/26/opinion/op-47600/3 .

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Epilogue

On December 7, 1941, a lazy Sunday morning was blasted apart by Japanese bombs dropping on Pearl Harbor. At UCLA, the war brought sorrows in battalions, with many students killed or crippled in battle, or sent off to internment camps. 1 World War II transformed Los Angeles as defense manufacturing, aviation, shipbuilding, entertainment, and fashion industries all boomed, with the city now “the leading urban center of not only California, but also of the new American West.” Before the war, Los

Angeles had been on a strong trajectory to assume this role, yet “Los Angeles was often perceived by many Americans, and particularly by federal authorities in Washington,

D.C. as California’s second city.” 2 After World War II, Los Angeles was the largest city in California and west of the Mississippi, with massive suburbs extending to Orange,

Ventura, and Riverside Counties. Soon it would rival New York City for leadership among all American cities, with UCLA riding along to prominence.

The 1940s would witness an incredible boom in campus building, skyrocketing enrollments, and two professional schools in law and in medicine, with a host of new advances coming in the 1950s and into the 1960s. UCLA entered into a golden age, however none of this would have been possible without the foundation laid in its beginning. Yet while the campus rose to prominence, problems from its past lingered on into the second half of the twentieth century. Japanese American students came home to

Los Angeles from internment campus having to fight to regain what had been taken from them. Students of color, and African Americans in particular still faced a racially

1 Gary Y. Okihiro, Storied Lives: Japanese American Students and World War II (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999), 30. In the case of Hitoshi Yonemura, who served in the 442 nd Regiment in Italy, some Japanese Americans were sent to campus and then also volunteered for military service as well. 2 Arthur C. Verge, “Paradise Transformed: The Impact of the Second World War on Los Angeles ,” Pacific Historical Review 63 , no. 3 (August 1994), 291. 291

segregated Westwood Village and difficulties in securing admission to UCLA. For many years following World War II, Westwood Village was not open to non-White renters. As

UCLA had sparse campus housing until only recently, this residential segregation placed tremendous burdens on students of color trying to commute great distances, especially in a city already plagued with gridlock on its roads. The University Religious Conference opened Stevens House (named after one of the founders, Episcopal Bishop Bertrand

Stevens) far outside campus and Westwood in 1948 as a place for UCLA’s women students of color to live, as only White students were welcomed in Westwood Village apartments at the time. 3 Hazel Hashmimoto Dunbar remembered that when she applied to live at Westwood apartments in the early 1950s, the landlords “wouldn’t say you couldn’t rent, they’d just say it was already ‘taken.’” 4 Former U.S. Congresswoman Diane

Watson, who served in Congress from 2003 to 2011 as the Representative for

California’s 33 rd Congressional District, which encompasses much of central Los

Angeles, graduated from UCLA in the 1950s, and recalled a landlady in Westwood

Village swearing that only “over her dead body would any colored girls come in.” 5 Rep.

Watson said that in the 1950s, “you could not live on Hilgard if you were black, except at the [YMCA].” 6 Private actors, whether racist landlords or a progressive YMCA, continued to have a great impact on UCLA, a public university. An institution that prized

3 Bob Pool, “Memories of a Haven Live on at UCLA,” Los Angeles Times , May 14, 1994, retrieved online on February 7, 2015 at http://articles.latimes.com/1994-05-14/local/me-57426_1_stevens-house . As of 1967, Stevens House, which was initially built four miles south of campus in West Los Angeles near University High School, housed 16 women students. 4 Ibid. Dunbar went on to graduate from UCLA and have a career as an after-school playground administrator, and averred that if Stevens House had not existed she would have had to travel from Gardena on a bus four hours each day to attend UCLA. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid. 292

inclusiveness still existed as a historical actor in a society full of racial and other kinds of discrimination, and its institutional trajectory was affected accordingly.

A university so strongly influenced by its local and state context soon was carried along by strong national trends in higher education. UCLA’s women students lost their longstanding majority from the 1920s amid the rush of World War II veterans coming to

UCLA to use their federal G.I. Bill benefits. Women struggled to gain admittance to prestigious new fields in the sciences, medicine, business, and public health and not just be consigned to stereotypically female-dominated fields. UCLA’s new graduate schools and programs secured massive federal funding for medical and other scientific research, and the old Normal School days of being second class to other research universities (like

Berkeley) were gone.

In the early 1960s, UCLA emerged (along with Berkeley) at the top of

California’s Master Planned pyramid, one of the top public universities in the nation, and yet before the decade was out would face years of turmoil and strife, along with the rest of the nation’s campuses. Campus leaders would be gazing into a distant mirror of the problems of the past, especially in the political battles of the 1930s. All of these events followed the paths laid down in the period of this study, and in order to understand

UCLA’s golden era—and its present social and cultural environment—we have delved deep into the earlier part of the last century, back to what was then the Great War, to the

Jazz Age, to the Great Depression—to street cars and student-soldiers, to a Great Flu and to films about college, out of a Normal School and toward a nationally renowned university.

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Conclusion

If we stand on top of the Spanish steps in downtown Los Angeles, we can look right at the original State Normal School—it was on the grounds of where the Los

Angeles Central Library is today. If we then hop in our car and drive a few miles west, we can visit UCLA’s old Vermont Avenue campus, where Los Angeles City College is today. And then if take a rather longer drive down a congested Santa Monica Boulevard and Sunset Boulevard, we would reach UCLA’s present Westwood location. There was not a convenient train to take you directly point to point, either back in the 1920s or today. We could take the bus—and exaggerating only a little—you could probably finish skimming this dissertation by the time you arrived at Royce Hall. UCLA moved a long way, in distance and in missions, over the course of this study.

Reflecting on our first words, a new thing is difficult to discover, even in the history of a city that craves the new. It is not possible to fully understand UCLA’s history without embedding it within the history of Los Angeles. When Los Angeles was a town, a normal school sufficed to satisfy the public sector need for higher education, but

Los Angeles did not long remain a town. While it is worthwhile to determine, as has recently been attempted by Keith Anderson, the extent to which the Normal School’s

DNA lives on in UCLA, in the end a Normal School is not a research university. UCLA became something very different in its first decades and as a result, graduate programs began, a new faculty displaced the old Normal School one, and Ernest Carroll Moore, one of UCLA’s founders, was cast aside as an old, fussbudget relic.

This dissertation has been an attempt at a different sort of history of an individual institution of higher education. While other institutional histories have tied their case

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examples to the college’s surrounding communities and historical contexts, this study has pushed farther in new directions. UCLA’s history is analyzed only after we have discussed the development of its predecessors in the private sector, growth of local high schools which later acted as feeders for UCLA, and rise of new types of institutions such as junior colleges, one of which inherited UCLA’s former campus on Vermont Avenue.

This analysis takes us beyond the boundaries of UCLA’s campus, and in fact predates the existence of a UCLA campus. UCLA’s ties to Los Angeles were vital, but even more important, perhaps, are its connections to California and to the nation. An international flu pandemic and a world war displayed the Normal School as transforming during its last year (1918) into something different, a “real” college campus, even if not quite yet a

University of California campus. The cool and temperate Los Angeles summer drew people to the Normal School and then to UCLA for a Summer Session that showed the year-round possibilities of the place, and Hollywood studios presented Southern

California campuses as the genuine article, and the public imaginary of what college looked like was assembled locally, reel by reel, on Los Angeles area campuses, including

UCLA.

As the first public university in Los Angeles, UCLA built along the lines of already existing models, most notably its parent, the University of California, Berkeley, and built on top of an already existing institution, the State Normal School of Los

Angeles. UCLA’s path to graduate education, the hallmark of a research university, went swiftly; it was the first university founded in the twentieth century to reach elite status, along with the Ivy League, Stanford, the University of Chicago, and major public research universities such as the University of Michigan and Berkeley itself. It owes

295

much of this rapid rise to the ambitions of its newly hired professors and students, mostly recruited from local public high schools with college preparatory programs. UCLA could not have come into existence prior to one vital condition being met—the growth of vast new public secondary enrollments and a high school population that followed a national trend in higher rates of college going. UCLA had a predominately White population due to structural factors like neighborhood racial segregation, accomplished through racially restrictive covenants and discriminatory lending practices, and a racially exclusive

Westwood Village, which condemned students and faculty of color to battle every day through a difficult, long commute. Even while UCLA itself maintained nondiscriminatory racial procedures, it necessarily was a creature of its environment and of its time and place.

UCLA was also the first major research university to begin as a normal school, and to have a female majority in enrollments, though this did not last past the 1940s, with the rise of graduate education and mainly male graduate students, and mass arrival of veterans studying on the G.I. Bill. Women made an enormous impact on UCLA’s early history, which has been closely examined here. UCLA fled from its schoolteacher training roots and the accompanying vast female majority in enrollments toward a more diverse curriculum, a larger course catalog, and a great increase in men on campus. Yet long after the end of the Normal School, the power of women students and professors and the Dean of Women Helen Matthewson Laughlin infused UCLA and their voices ring clearly through this study.

Further, UCLA’s Westwood campus was the first concerted and purposeful effort by private concerns to build a planned college town, Westwood Village, next to a new

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university campus, and in its beginnings if not in the long run, the experiment was successful. UCLA and its private sector partners remade the West Los Angeles landscape, transforming acres of scrub brush crossed by dirt roads to an ambitiously planned campus neighboring a new college village, a public/private partnership for prestige and profit that was not possible for a small Normal School lacking private real estate investments, which were flowing more and more to the West Side of Los Angeles and later to the San Fernando Valley.

UCLA, like a little sun glowing ever more fiercely in central Los Angeles and then in Westwood, drew students and professors, businesses, and private and public money to it, and fueled on the aggregate hopes of both the public and private sector, grew and grew, both university and college. Activity swirled around UCLA, whether in building construction on campus or in Westwood Village, social life, or intellectual and cultural exchanges. As exciting as this was, as mentioned above, not everyone was equally able to join in the dance, with students of color consigned to commuter status by racially restrictive covenants in Westwood Village and the exclusive areas around it, and with the main avenues of social life (and access to precious scholarship funds) reserved mainly for sororities and fraternities, which freely discriminated based on race, ethnicity, and religion. A chilly climate indeed, and while the modern observer perhaps should not expect more from UCLA in the 1920s and 1930s than what it was capable of in the context of its times, it remains clear that UCLA’s often troubled racial scene has its roots in its mainly segregated (if only informal segregation) early past.

It is my hope that historians of higher education, even if they are writing “house histories” for colleges and universities, will tie their cases to their broader contexts. We

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cannot fully understand UCLA’s rise without understanding its Los Angeles background and the hard work that had already been done by USC, Pomona, Caltech, Occidental,

Loyola, and other private colleges, and also giving attention to local high schools that sent many students to UCLA. An eighteen year-old college student three months previously was a high school student somewhere else, and this simple fact is too often ignored by education scholars who draw arbitrary lines between college and high school campuses. As we see in the history of Los Angeles, often high schools acted like colleges and even served as junior colleges.

Studying UCLA’s beginnings is important for its own sake, but is also instructive in showing how a university or any great new institution is founded and how it grows—it never starts on a blank page but its story is written alongside and sometimes even over its local and broader physical, social, geographical, political, economic, and social environment. This view does not ignore the bright line between campus and town—these are often real and compelling physical and psychological boundaries. If we study UCLA, or any one case, in strict isolation and without embedding in its historically relevant context, then we make its history a family photo album with some fun newspaper clippings. Only by tying UCLA’s early history to that of Los Angeles and knitting it into a broader cloth of higher education history can this study be made relevant to our times, and capture its full story.

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PLATES

299

Plate 1. St. Vincent’s College, 1866. Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library.

St. Vincent’s College (later Loyola College and then Loyola Marymount University) was the first college in Los Angeles, founded in 1865.

300

Plate 2. President Theodore Roosevelt speaks at Pomona College , 1903, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library.

301

Plate 3. Occidental College in 1904 , 1904. Los Angeles Public Library.

302

Plate 4. Edward Doheny Jr. Memorial Library , ca. 1932, Security Pacific

National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. The Doheny Library was part of a massive building expansion on USC’s campus in this period.

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Plate 5. Korean American Women at UCLA, ca. 1940. Shades of L.A.: Korean American Community/Los Angeles Public Library.

Mary (Lee) Shon in the middle, with her friends, on the Janss Steps. This spot looks much the same today, with similar landscaping and the bench is still there. In 1935, there were two Korean students at USC, and Mary was one of them (as mentioned in Chapter 4, USC was more successful than its local peers in enrolling Korean American students). Mary graduated in 1939, and became a social worker who helped Chinese, Korean, and Filipino/a families in Los Angeles for many years. https://news.usc.edu/22343/Mary-Chun-Lee-Shon-then-and-now/ .

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Plate 6 . Charles C. Pierce, State Normal School Teachers , 1884. Charles C. Pierce Collection/Los Angeles Public Library

305

Plate 7 . Los Angeles State Normal School, Southwest Corner , ca. 1893, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Central Public Library. Downtown Los Angeles (site of present day Central Library).

306

Plate 8 . State Normal School, Los Angeles , 1912, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Normal School teacher trainees on campus.

307

Plate 9 . State Normal School, aerial view , 1918, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library.

Explanation, as quoted directly from Library’s summary of this photo follows: “Aerial view of the State Normal School, located at Grand Avenue and 5th Street. Because the school sat impressively on the last knoll of Bunker Hill, aptly dubbed "Normal Hill", there were two ways to get to the main entrance: either taking the long and winding driveway located on the left side, or a long flight of stairs on the right (partially covered by the trees), which was parallel to 5th Street. The beautiful brick building had numerous tall windows all around, several chimneys, gabled dormers, a tower with a balcony and ornate grill, a set of stairs on either side leading to the main doors, and beautiful landscaping all around. The large white building on the left is the Bible Institute, later to become the Church of the Open Door, that was located on Hope Street. After the demolition of this structure, 5th Street was straightened and the remainder of the site was eventually occupied by the L.A. Public Library.”

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Plate 10 . Charles W. Beam, Hollywood High School 1922 graduating class , 1922. Los Angeles Public Library. Some of the first prospective students of UCLA, which would add a third and fourth year shortly, are shown here. In the 1920s and 1930s, Hollywood High graduates featured prominently on campus and in leadership positions.

309

Plate 11 . Manual Arts High School , ca. 1930. Los Angeles Public Library. Local high schools competed with colleges for prestige and even students during early days of junior colleges. Their architecture showed their institutional aspirations to be mini-colleges.

310

Plate 1 2. Edward A. Dickson , 1932, Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles

Public Library. Graduate of the University of California, Berkeley, editor and publisher of the Los Angeles Evening Express , first Regent of the University of California from Southern California. Known as “The Godfather” of UCLA.

311

Plate 1 3. Keystone Photo Service, Millspaugh Hall at the University of California, Southern Branch, ca. 1920, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. The Southern Campus was located on Vermont Avenue at the present site of Los Angeles City College from 1919 to 1929, and won national awards for landscape architecture, and was a beautiful place, lush and verdant.

312

Plate 1 4. Millspaugh Hall at the University of California , ca. 1925, Shades of L.A.: African American Community/Los Angeles Public Library. Note the ivy covered front, which Ralph Bunche spent many hours trimming, according to his recollections.

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Plate 1 5 (top). Graduation Portrait , 1927, Shades of L.A.: African American Community/Los Angeles Public Library. Ralph Bunche, graduation photo, UCLA, 1927.

Plate 16 (bottom). Friends at the Beach , 1923, Shades of L.A.: African American Community/Los Angeles Public Library. Ralph Bunche in the middle with the cap on his head.

314

Plate 1 7. Edwin Janss, Sr., no date given. Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Janss and his brother Harold developed Westwood Village in conjunction with UCLA, which was built on land formerly owned by the Janss Investment Company. The brothers developed properties across Southern California, from Thousand Oaks to Van Nuys to Boyle Heights to Yorba Linda and many other areas.

315

Plate 1 8. Future Santa Monica Boulevard , 1922, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library.

Janss Brothers Viewing Future Santa Monica Boulevard in 1922, at least two years before their bid to build Westwood Village as a college town. At this time, the Janss brothers conceived the area as a possible new planned movie colony, a Hollywood for the West Side.

316

Plate 19 . Observation Tower in Westwood and Wilshire , ca. 1924,

Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. The tower advertised the construction of the new development, but it was still unclear whether a University of California campus would anchor it, yet the Janss Brothers had high hopes.

317

Plate 20 . Westwood Boulevard in Westwood Village , ca. 1930, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Holmby Building is in background to the right.

318

Plate 2 1. Fox Westwood Village Movie Theater, ca. 1938, Security

Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library.

319

Plate 22 . Herman Schultheis, Tropical Ice Gardens , Westwood, ca. 1940, Herman J. Schultheis Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. This rather bizarre attraction was opened in December 1938 but only lasted until 1949, when it was torn down to make room for UCLA’s campus expansion. It was located at the corner of Weyburn and Gayley Avenues.

320

Plate 23 . Holmby Building in Westwood, ca. 1937, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. UCLA’s southern entrance at the intersection of LeConte Avenue and Westwood Boulevard, looking southwest.

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322

Plate 2 4 (top). Polytechnic High School students , ca. 1935, Shades of L.A.: African American Community/Los Angeles Public Library Tom Bradley (in the middle), who later in life would be Mayor of Los Angeles (1973-1993), with Martha Rucker (left) and Peggy Jones (right) at Polytechnic High School. Bradley’s high school counselor advised him against going to college; he went to UCLA anyway.

Plate 25. (bottom). Mayor Bradley’s keepsakes , 1985. Herald-Examiner Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Bradley’s high school football photograph; he ran track at UCLA on an athletic scholarship and joined Kappa Alpha Psi, UCLA’s first African American fraternity. He left UCLA to join the LAPD, then became an attorney, and finally, Mayor.

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Plate 2 6. Building at Los Angeles Junior College , 1938. Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Still the Normal School and Southen Branch’s old Millspaugh Hall, but now the main building for Los Angeles Junior College. What was considered a campus near downtown in the 1920s soon was referred to as East Hollywood, as the cultural and social geography of a city shifted. As you can see, the ivy was still lustrous and cared little whether this was a university or junior college.

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Plate 2 7. Herman Schultheis, Students relaxing in the commons at Los Angeles Junior College students, ca. 1937, Herman J. Schultheis Collection/Los Angeles Public Library, A similar shot to what we often see of UCLA, both in the 1930s and today, and here we see the junior college still seems to be a full college, no less than UCLA, in the photographer’s gaze. Schultheis, a German, had emigrated to the United States in the mid-1920s and so perhaps he blessedly could avoid judgments based on prestige that Americans might have automatically made.

325

Plate 2 8. UC President, UCLA Provost, 1937, Security Pacific

National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Robert Gordon Sproul (1930-1958) (left) and new Vice President and Provost of UCLA Earle Hedrick (1937-1942), who took over after Ernest Carroll Moore was forced into retirement.

326

Plate 2 9. R.M. Huddleston, Bel-Air and Westwood panorama , 1929. Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. One of a five-part panel of photographs taken from high up in the hills overlooking Westwood. It is plain how little of the area around the new university is developed, and the west side of Los Angeles, from this view, still seems mainly untouched by developers.

327

Plate 30 . U.C.L.A. Campus Opening Day , 1929, Security Pacific National Bank Collection/Los Angeles Public Library. Regent Dickson, hands in pockets, is in the foreground group of four men, to the far right.

328

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Park, Bernice W. Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985. Interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, 2000.

Roberts, John D. Interview by Rachel Prud’homme. Pasadena, California, February 22, 28, March 7, 21, 25, April 12, and May 10, 1985. Oral History Project, California Institute of Technology Archives. Retrieved from the World Wide Web July 10, 2013, http://oralhistories.library.caltech.edu/173/1/Roberts,_J._OHO.pdf .

Scott, Flora M. Chequered career oral history transcript: Scotland to UCLA. Interviewed by James Mink. Collection 300/102. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, 1973.

Sinsabaugh, Helen. Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985. Interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, 2000.

Smith, Maxine Olsen. “UCLA Student Leaders: Maxine Olsen Smith.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1991 by Teresa Barnett. Collection

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300/373. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Sumner, Ann. “Distinguished Alumna: Ann Sumner.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1970-71 by Winston Wutkee. Collection 300/318. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Toberman, Lucy Guild. “UCLA Student Leaders: Lucy Guild Toberman.” Transcript of oral history conducted in 1990 by Dale Trelevan. Collection 300/374. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

“ .” Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985. Interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, 2000.

Underhill, Robert M. University of California lands, finances and investment: oral history transcript: and related material, 1966-1967. Interviewed by Verne Stadtman. Bancroft Library, Regional Oral History Office, 1966.

Valentine, Joe. Westwood pioneers oral history transcript, 1979-1985. Interviewed by Mary Lee Greenblatt and Betty Lou Young. Collection 300/579. Los Angeles: Oral History Program, University of Los Angeles, 2000.

Westergaard, Waldemar. “Memoirs of a Historian.” Interviewed by Doyce B. Nunis. Collection 300/33. Oral History Program, University of California, Los Angeles, c1965.

Wittenberg, Florence Blackman, “UCLA Student Leaders: Florence Blackman Wittenberg." Transcript of oral history conducted in 1991 by Teresa Barnett. Collection 300/414. Department of Special Collections, Young Research Library, University of California, Los Angeles.

Books and Unpublished Dissertations

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Almaguer, Tomás. Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.

Anderson, Keith W. The Los Angeles State Normal School: UCLA's Forgotten Past: 1881-1919 . Lulu.com, 2015.

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Aron, Stephen. The American West: A Very Short Introduction . New York: Oxford University Press, 2015.

Bachin, Robin Faith. Building the South Side: Urban Space and Civic Culture in Chicago, 1890-1919 . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004.

Banham, Reyner. Los Angeles; the Architecture of Four Ecologies . New York: Harper & Row, 1971.

Barry, John M. The Great Influenza: The Epic Story of the Deadliest Plague in History . New York: Viking, 2004.

Barzun, Jacques. The American University; How It Runs, Where It Is Going . New York: Harper & Row, 1968.

Bashaw, Carolyn Terry. "Stalwart Women": A Historical Analysis of Deans of Women in the South . New York: Teachers College Press, 1999.

Berube, Maurice R. The Urban University in America . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1978.

Best, John Hardin. Historical Inquiry in Education: A Research Agenda . Washington, D.C.: American Educational Research Association, 1983.

Blackford, Mansel G. The Lost Dream: Businessmen and City Planning on the Pacific Coast, 1890-1920 . Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1993.

Blumenthal, John. Hollywood High: The History of America's Most Famous Public School . New York: Ballantine Books, 1988.

Bordin, Ruth. Women at Michigan: The "dangerous Experiment,” 1870 to the Present . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Brint, Steven G., and Jerome Karabel. The Diverted Dream: Community Colleges and the Promise of Educational Opportunity in America, 1900-1985 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1989.

Brown, Robert T. The Rise and Fall of the People's Colleges: The Westfield Normal School, 1839-1914 . Westfield, Mass.: Institute for Massachusetts Studies, Westfield State College, 1988.

Brown, Tamara L., Gregory Parks, and Clarenda M. Phillips. African American Fraternities and Sororities: The Legacy and the Vision . Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky, 2005.

335

Brubacher, John Seiler, and Willis Rudy. Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities . New Brunswick, NJ, U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1997.

Brubacher, John Seiler, and Willis Rudy. Higher Education in Transition: A History of American Colleges and Universities . 4th ed. New Brunswick, N.J., U.S.A.: Transaction Publishers, 1997.

Bulman, Robert C. Hollywood Goes to High School: Cinema, Schools, and American Culture . New York: Worth Pub., 2005.

Bulosan, Carlos. America Is in the Heart: A Personal History . Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1973.

Butchart, Ronald E. "Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861-1917." History of Education Quarterly History Educ Quarterly 42, no. 1 (2002): 1-17.

Byerly, Carol R. Fever of War: The Influenza Epidemic in the U.S. Army during World War I . New York: New York University Press, 2005.

California in the 1930s: The WPA Guide to the Golden State . Berkeley, CA: University Of California Press, 2013.

California of the Southland: A History of the University of California at Los Angeles . Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Alumni Association, 1937.

Chang, Roberta, and Wayne Patterson. The Koreans in Hawai'i: A Pictorial History, 1903-2003 . Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 2003.

Clary, William Webb. History of the Law Firm of O'Melveny & Myers, 1885-1965 . Los Angeles: Grant Dahlstrom, 1966.

Clary, William Webb. The Claremont Colleges; a History of the Development of the Claremont Group Plan . Claremont, Calif.: Claremont University Center, 1970.

Cleland, Robert Glass. The History of Occidental College, 1887-1937 . Los Angeles: the Ward Ritchie Press, 1937.

Clifford, Geraldine Jonçich. "Equally in View": The University of California, Its Women, and the Schools . Berkeley, Calif.: Center for Studies in Higher Education and Institute of Governmental Studies Press, University of California, Berkeley, 1995.

Cohen, Arthur M. The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass Publishers, 1998.

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Cohen, Arthur M., Florence B. Brawer, and Carrie B. Kisker. The American Community College, 6th Edition . John Wiley & Sons, 2013.

Cohen, Arthur M., and Florence B. Brawer. The American Community College . 4th ed. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 2003.

Cohen, Arthur M., and Carrie B. Kisker. The Shaping of American Higher Education: Emergence and Growth of the Contemporary System . 2nd ed. San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2010.

Cohen, Robert. When the Old Left Was Young: Student Radicals and America's First Mass Student Movement, 1929-1941 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

Conable, Charlotte Williams. Women at Cornell: The Myth of Equal Education . Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1977.

Conklin, John E. Campus Life in the Movies: A Critical Survey from the Silent Era to the Present . Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2008.

Cox, James Norwood. The Urban Community College: A Case Study of Los Angeles City College from 1929 to 1970 . Ph.D. Diss, University of California, Los Angeles. Los Angeles, CA: University of Calif., 1971.

Crosby, Alfred W. America's Forgotten Pandemic: The Influenza of 1918. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003.

Crouchett, Lorraine Jacobs. Filipinos in California: From the Days of the Galleons to the Present . El Cerrito, CA: Downey Place Pub. House, 1982.

Culver, Lawrence, William Deverell, and Greg Hise. "America’s Playground: Recreation and Race." In A Companion to Los Angeles , 422-437. Chichester, West Sussex, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2010.

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Davis, Clark. Company Men: White-collar Life and Corporate Cultures in Los Angeles, 1892-1941 . Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2000.

Davis, Margo Baumgarten, and Roxanne Nilan. The Stanford Album: A Photographic History, 1885-1945 . Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.

Davis, Mike. City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles . London: Verso, 1990.

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De Falle, Paul M. "Lantern in the Western Sky: The Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, 1871." In A Southern California Historical Anthology , 155-88. Los Angeles: Historical Society of Los Angeles, 1984.

Deverell, William. "Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity: Boosting Los Angeles, 1880- 1930." In Power and Place in the North American West , ed. by Douglas Flamming, 117-43. Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1999.

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Deverell, William, and Douglas Flamming. "Race, Rhetoric, and Regional Identity: Boosting Los Angeles: 1880-1930." In Power and Place in the North American West , 117-143. Seattle: Center for the Study of the Pacific Northwest in Association with University of Washington Press, 1999.

Dickerman, Watson. The Historical Development of the Summer Session in Higher Institutions in the United States. Ph.D. diss., University of Chicago, 1948.

Dickson, Edward Augustus. University of California at Los Angeles: Its Origin and Formative Years. Los Angeles: Friends of the UCLA Library, 1955.

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Dober, Richard P. Campus Architecture: Building in the Groves of Academe . New York: McGraw-Hill, 1996.

Dober, Richard P. Campus Landscape: Functions, Forms, Features . New York: Wiley, 2000.

Dougherty, Kevin James. The Contradictory College: The Conflicting Origins, Impacts, and Futures of the Community College . Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994.

Douglass, John Aubrey. The California Idea and American Higher Education: 1850 to the 1960 Master Plan . Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000.

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Dundjerski, Marina. UCLA: The First Century . London: Third Millennium Pub., 2011.

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Elliott, Orrin Leslie. Stanford University, the First Twenty-five Years . London: Stanford Univ. Press, 1937.

Engh, Michael. "Practically Every Religion Being Represented." In Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s , 201-219. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Faderman, Lillian, and Stuart Timmons. Gay L.A.: A History of Sexual Outlaws, Power Politics, and Lipstick Lesbians . New York: Basic Books, 2006.

Falk, Charles John. The Development and Organization of Education in California . New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1968.

Farmer, Jared. Trees in Paradise: A California History . New York: Norton, 2013.

Fass, Paula S. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920's . New York: Oxford University Press, 1977.

Faust, Drew Gilpin. This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2008.

Feisst, Sabine. Schoenberg's New World: The American Years . New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Ferrier, William Warren. Ninety Years of Education in California, 1846-1936; a Presentation of Educational Movements and Their Outcome in Education Today. Berkeley, Calif.: Sather Gate Book Shop, 1937.

Flamming, Douglas. Bound for Freedom Black Los Angeles in Jim Crow America . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2005.

Flamming, Douglas. "The Star of Ethiopia and the NAACP: Pageantry, Politics, and the African American Community of Los Angeles." In Metropolis in the Making: Los Angeles in the 1920s , 145-160. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001.

Fogelson, Robert M. The Fragmented Metropolis Los Angeles, 1850-1930 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993.

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Foster, Mark S. The Decentralization of Los Angeles during the 1920's . Ph.D. Diss (University of California, Los Angeles). 1971.

Fountain, Ben E., and Terrence Alfred. Tollefson. Community Colleges in the United States: Forty-nine State Systems . Washington, D.C.: American Association of Community and Junior Colleges, 1989.

Freeland, Richard M. Academia's Golden Age: Universities in Massachusetts, 1945- 1970 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Gaines, Thomas A. The Campus as a Work of Art . New York: Praeger, 1991.

Gebhard, David and Robert Winter. An Architectural Guidebook to Los Angeles . Salt Lake City: Gibbs Smith, 2003.

Geiger, Roger L. To Advance Knowledge: The Growth of American Research Universities, 1900-1940 . New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.

“ .” Research and Relevant Knowledge: American Research Universities since World War II . New York: Oxford University Press, 1993.

“ .” History of American Higher Education: Learning and Culture from the Founding to World War II . Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2014.

“ .” "The Era of Multipurpose Colleges in American Higher Education, 1850-1890." In The American College in the Nineteenth Century , 80-90. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2000.

Gerth, Donald R., and Judson Grenier. A History of the California State University and Colleges . Carson, Calif. (1000 East Victoria St., Carson 90747): Office of University Relations, California State University, Dominguez Hills, 1981.

Gleye, Paul, Julius Shulman, and Bruce Boehner. The Architecture of Los Angeles . Los Angeles: Rosebud Books, 1981.

Gonzalez, Gilbert G. Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants, 1880-1930 . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

“ .” Chicano Education in the Era of Segregation . Philadelphia: Balch Institute Press, 1990.

“ .” Culture of Empire: American Writers, Mexico, and Mexican Immigrants, 1880-1930 . Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004.

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Goodchild, Lester F., and Harold S. Wechsler. ASHE Reader on the History of Higher Education . Needham Heights, MA: Ginn Press, 1989.

Goodchild, Lester F. Higher Education in the American West: Regional History and State Contexts . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Goodchild, Lester F., and Irene Huk. "A Survey of American College Histories." In Higher Education: Handbook of Theory and Research, Volume VI , 201-290. New York: Agathon Press, 1990.

Goodchild, Lester F., Richard W. Jonsen, Patricia Limerick, and David A. Longanecker, eds. Higher Education in the American West: Regional History and State Contexts . New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014.

Goodstein, Judith R. Millikan's School: A History of the California Institute of Technology . New York: Norton &, 1991.

Gordon, Lynn. "From Seminary to University: An Overview of Women’s Higher Education, 1870-1920." In The History of Higher Education , 473-498. 2nd ed. Needham Heights, MA: Simon & Schuster Custom Publ., 1997.

“ .” Gender and Higher Education in the Progressive Era . New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990.

Gray, James. The University of Minnesota, 1851-1951 . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1951.

Griffin, Clifford S. The University of Kansas; a History . Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1974.

Gruber, Carol S. Mars and Minerva: World War I and the Uses of the Higher Learning in America . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1975.

Gumprecht, Blake. The American College Town . Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2008.

Gyory, Andrew. Closing the Gate: Race, Politics, and the Chinese Exclusion Act . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998.

Hamilton, Andrew, and John Bryan Jackson. UCLA on the Move, during Fifty Golden Years, 1919-1969. Los Angeles: Ward Ritchie Press, 1969.

Hendrick, Irving G. California Education: A Brief History . San Francisco: Boyd & Fraser Pub., 1980.

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Henry, Charles P. "Introduction." In Ralph J. Bunche: Selected Speeches and Writings , 1- 11. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995.

Hill, Laurance Landreth. Six Collegiate Decades: The Growth of the Higher Education in Southern California . Los Angeles: Security-First National Bank of Los Angeles, 1929.

Hill, Ruth Edmonds. The Black Women Oral History Project: From the Arthur and Elizabeth Schlesinger Library on the History of Women in America, Radcliffe College . Westport, CT: Meckler, 1991.

Hine, Robert V., and John Mack Faragher. The American West: A New Interpretive History . New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000.

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. The Power and Passion of M. Carey Thomas . New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1994.

“ .” Alma Mater: Design and Experience in the Women's Colleges from Their Nineteenth-century Beginnings to the 1930s . New York: Knopf, 1984.

“ .” Campus Life: Undergraduate Cultures from the End of the Eighteenth Century to the Present . New York: Knopf, 1987.

Hughes, William. "The Valuation of Film as Evidence." In The Historian and Film . New York: Cambridge University Press, 1978.

Hurewitz, Daniel. Bohemian Los Angeles and the Making of Modern Politics . Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007.

Hurh, Won Moo. The Korean Americans . Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1998.

Ides, Matthew Allan. “Cruising for Community: Youth Culture and Politics in Los Angeles, 1910-1970.” Ph.D. diss., University of Michigan, 2009.

Kerr, Clark. The Gold and the Blue a Personal Memoir of the University of California. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003.

Klein, Norman M. The History of Forgetting: Los Angeles and the Erasure of Memory . London: Verso, 1998.

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Koszarski, Richard. An Evening's Entertainment: The Age of the Silent Feature Picture, 1915-1928 . New York: Scribner ;, 1990.

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Kurashige, Scott. The Shifting Grounds of Race: Black and Japanese Americans in the Making of Multiethnic Los Angeles . Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Lee, Calvin B. T. The Campus Scene, 1900-1970; Changing Styles in Undergraduate Life, . New York: McKay, 1970.

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The Los Angeles State Normal School: A Quarter Centennial History, 1882-1907. Los Angeles, 1908.

Lucas, Christopher J. American Higher Education: A History . New York, NY: St. Martin's Press, 1994, 2006.

Lughod, Janet L. New York, Chicago, Los Angeles: America's Global Cities . Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999.

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MacDonald, Malcolm. Schoenberg . New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

MacDonald, Victoria Maria, and Teresa Garcia. "Historical Perspectives on Latino Access to Higher Education, 1848-1990." In The Majority in the Minority Expanding the Representation of Latina/o Faculty, Administrators, and Students in Higher Education , 15-46. Sterling, Va.: Stylus Pub., 2003.

Madsen, David. The National University, Enduring Dream of the USA . Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1966.

Markel, Howard, Alexandra Stern, Julian A. Navarro, and Joseph R. Michalsen. A Historical Assessment of Nonpharmaceutical Disease Containment Strategies Employed by Selected U.S. Communities during the Second Wave of the 1918- 1920 Influenza Pandemic: Final Report: January 31, 2006 . Fort Belvoir, VA: Defense Threat Reduction Agency, Advanced Systems and Concepts Office, 2006.

Martin, James R. The University of California (in Los Angeles): A Resume of the Selection and Acquisition of the Westwood Site . Los Angeles, CA, 1925.

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May, Kirse Granat. Golden State, Golden Youth: The California Image in Popular Culture, 1955-1966 . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

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McDonough, Patricia M. Choosing Colleges: How Social Class and Schools Structure Opportunity . Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997.

McGroarty, John Steven. A Year and a Day; Westwood Village, Westwood Hills . London: Forgotten Books, 2013.

McGuigan, Dorothy Gies. A Dangerous Experiment; 100 Years of Women at the University of Michigan. Ann Arbor: Center for Continuing Education of Women, 1970.

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“ .” "Advocates on Campus: Deans of Women Create a New Profession." In Women Administrators in Higher Education: Historical and Contemporary Perspectives . Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001.

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“ .” Inventing the Dream: California through the Progressive Era . New York: Oxford University Press, 1985.

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“ .” Embattled Dreams: California in War and Peace, 1940-1950 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002.

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“ .” Golden Dreams: California in an Age of Abundance, 1950-1963 . Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009.

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Umphlett, Wiley Lee. The Movies Go to College: Hollywood and the World of the College-life Film . Rutherford [N.J.: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1984.

University of California, Los Angeles. California of the Southland: A History of the University of California at Los Angeles. Los Angeles: University of California at Los Angeles Alumni Association, 1937.

Verge, Arthur C. Paradise Transformed: Los Angeles during the Second World War . Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt Pub., 1993.

Veysey, Laurence R. The Emergence of the American University . Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965.

Westmeyer, Paul. A History of American Higher Education . Springfield, Ill., U.S.A.: Thomas, 1985.

Wilkerson, Isabel. The Warmth of Other Suns: The Epic Story of America's Great Migration . New York, NY: Random House, 2010.

Winter, Carl G. History of the Junior College Movement in California . Sacramento: California State Dept. of Education, 1964.

Wollenberg, Charles. All Deliberate Speed: Segregation and Exclusion in California Schools, 1855-1975 . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Woody, Thomas. A History of Women's Education in the United States. New York: Octagon Books, 1966, 1929.

Wyatt, David. Five Fires: Race, Catastrophe, and the Shaping of California . Reading, Mass.: Addison-Wesley Pub., 1997.

Yoo, David. Growing up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924-49 . Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000.

Young, Arthur P. Higher Education in American Life, 1636-1986: A Bibliography of Dissertations and Theses . New York: Greenwood Press, 1988.

Yu, Eui-Young, Earl H. Phillips, and Eun Sik. Yang. Koreans in Los Angeles: Prospects and Promises . Los Angeles: Koryo Research Institute, 1982.

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Zesch, Scott. The Chinatown War: Chinese Los Angeles and the Massacre of 1871 . London: Oxford University Press, 2012.

Journal Articles

Allmendinger, Jr., David F. “Mount Holyoke Students Encounter the Need for Life- Planning, 1837-1850.” History of Education Quarterly 19 (Spring 1979): 27-46.

Beech, Mark. "Presidents'-Eye View of History of Higher Education." History of Education Quarterly 12 (1972): 575-584.

Bender, Richard and J. Parmen. “New Campus for New Communities: The University and Exurbia.” Places 17 (1) (2005): 54-59.

Brienes , Marvin. "Smog Comes to Los Angeles ." Southern California Quarterly 43 ,4 (1976) : 516-533.

Butchart, Ronald. “Mission Matters: Mount Holyoke, Oberlin, and the Schooling of Southern Blacks, 1861-1917.” History of Education Quarterly 42 (2002): 1-17.

Clark, Daniel M. “The Two Joes Meet: Joe College, Joe Veteran: The GI Bill, College Education, and Postwar American Culture.” History of Education Quarterly 38(2), (1998): 165-189.

Crawford, Dorothy Lamb. "Arnold Schoenberg in Los Angeles." The Musical Quarterly 86, no. 1 (2002): 6-48.

De Falla, Paul M. "Lantern in the Western Sky: The Chinese Massacre in Los Angeles, 1871," in A Southern California Historical Anthology , ed. Doyce B. Nunis, Jr. Los Angeles: Historical Society of Los Angeles, 1984.

DeGraaf, Laurence. “City of Black Angels: The Evolution of the Los Angeles Ghetto, 1890-1930.” Pacific Historical Review 89 , (1970): 328-358

Dorn, Charles. "'A Woman's World': The University of California, Berkeley, During the Second World War ." History of Education Quarterly 48 (4), (2008), 534–664.

Eisenmann, Linda. "Creating a Framework for Interpreting U.S. Women's Educational History: Lessons from Historical Lexiconography." History of Education Quarterly 30(5) , (2001): 453-470.

Eisenmann, Linda. "Reconsidering a Classic: Assessing the History of Women's Higher Education a Dozen Years After Barbara Solomon." Harvard Educational Review 67 , (1997): 689-717.

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Frank, Stephanie. "Claiming Hollywood Boosters, the Film Industry, and Metropolitan Los Angeles." Journal of Urban History 38 , no. 1 (2012): 71-88.

Gelber, S. "A 'Hard-Boiled Order': The Reeducation of Disabled WWI Veterans in New York City." Journal of Social History 39, no. 1 (2005): 161-80.

Gish, Todd. "Growing and Selling Los Angeles: The All-Year Club of Southern California, 1921-1941." Southern California Quarterly 89, no. 4 (2007): 391- 415.

Hayes-Bautista, David, Marco A. Firebaugh, Cynthia Chamberlain, and Cristine Gamboa. “Reginaldo Francisco del Valle: UCLA's Forgotten Forefather.” Southern California Quarterly , 2006.

Heiling, Juliah Vasquez, Laurel Dietz, and Michael Volonnino. “From Jim Crow to the Top 10% Plan: A Historical Analysis of Latina/o Access to a Selective Flagship University.” Enrollment Management Journal, Fall 2011, 83-109.

Hendrick, Irving. “Federal Policies Affecting the Education of Indians in California, 1849-1934." History of Education Quarterly (1976): 162-183.

Higgs, Robert. "Landless by Law: Japanese Immigrants in California Agriculture to 1941." J. Eco. History The Journal of Economic History 38, no. 01 (1978): 205- 25.

Holsband, Frances. “Campus in Place.” Places 17 (1) (2005): 7-11.

Horowitz, Helen Lefkowitz. "Designing for the Genders: Curricula and Architecture at Scripps College and the California Institute of Technology." Pacific Historical Review 54, no. 4 (1985): 439-61.

Johnson, Eldon L. "Misconceptions About the Early Land-Grant Colleges." Journal of Higher Education 52 ,(4), (1981): 333-351.

Johnson, Niall P. A. S., and Juergen Mueller. "Updating the Accounts: Global Mortality of the 1918-1920 "Spanish" Influenza Pandemic." Bulletin of the History of Medicine 76, no. 1 (2002): 105-15.

Keppel, Ben. “Thinking through a Life: Reconsidering the Origins of Ralph J. Bunche.” The Journal of Negro Education 73 (2 ), (2004): 116-124.

Linville, Susan E. "Black Face/White Face." New Review of Film and Television Studies 5, no. 3 (2007): 269-84.

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MacDonald, Victoria María. “Hispanic, Latino, Chicano, or ‘Other’?: Deconstructing the Relationship between Historians and Hispanic American Educational History.” History of Education Quarterly 41(3 ), (2001): 365-413.

Martin, Howard. "Summer at North American Universities and Colleges: Impacts and Influences." Summer Academe 4 (2003).

Menchaca, Martha. and Richard R. Valencia. “Anglo-Saxon Ideologies in the 1920s- 1930s: their Impact on the Segregation of Mexican-American Students in California.” Anthropology and Education Quarterly, 21 (1990): 222-249.

More, Ellen S. ""A Certain Restless Ambition": Women Physicians and World War I." American Quarterly 41, no. 4 (1989): 636.

Nicholls, Walter J. "The Los Angeles School: Difference, Politics, City." International Journal of Urban and Regional Research , 2011, 189-206.

Ogren, Christine A. "Where Coeds Were Coeducated: Normal Schools in Wisconsin, 1870-1920." History of Education Quarterly 35, no. 1 (1995): 1.

Poli, Adon, and Warren M. Engstrand. "Japanese Agriculture on the Pacific Coast." The Journal of Land and Public Utility Economics 21, no. 4 (1945): 352-64.

Raftery, Judith. “Missing the Mark: Intelligence Testing in Los Angeles,” History of Education Quarterly 28(1) , (1988): 73-93.

Ross, Hugh. "University Influence in the Genesis and Growth of Junior Colleges in California." History of Education Quarterly 3, no. 3 (1963): 143.

San Miguel, Jr., Guadalupe. “Status of the Historiography of Chicano Education: a Preliminary Analysis.” History of Education Quarterly 26(4) , (1987): 523-536.

Schwartz, Robert Arthur. "How Deans of Women Became Men." The Review of Higher Education 20, no. 4 (1997): 419-36.

Stickney, Jr, Jefferson R. “S.A.T.C., San Diego’s Student Army,” Journal of San Diego History 27 (3)(Summer 1981), 1-12.

Sally Sims Stokes. “In A Climate Like Ours: The California Campuses of Allison & Allison,” California History 84 (4), (Fall 2007), 26-65.

Tamura, Eileen H. “Asian-Americans in the History of Education: an Historiographical Essay.” History of Education Quarterly 41(1), (2001) : 58-71

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Thelin, John R. and Christian Anderson. "Campus Life Revealed: Tracking Down the Rich Resources of American Collegiate Fiction." Journal of Higher Education 80 (1) (2008): 409-419.

Thelin, John R. "Life and Learning in Southern California: Private Colleges in the Popular Culture." History of Education Quarterly 15 (1975): 111-117.

" ." "California and the Colleges." California Historical Quarterly (two parts) Part I: (Summer 1977) vol. LVI, no. 2, pp. 140-163; Part II: (Fall 1977) vol. LVI, no. 3, pp. 230-249.

Weiler, Katherine. “The Case of Martha Deane: Sexuality and Power at Cold War UCLA,” History of Education Quarterly 47 (4) (Fall 2007), 470-496.

Zook, George F. “The Residence of University and College Students.” School and Society 21 (1925), 415-422.

Motion Pictures

The Wild Party . Directed by Dorothy Arzner. Performed by Clara Bow, Jack Luden, Shirley O'Hara, Phillips Holmes, and Jean Lorraine. United States: Paramount Pictures, 1929.

Brown Of Harvard . Directed by Jack Conway. United States: MGM, 1926.

College . Directed by James W. Horne. Performed by Buster Keaton. United States: United Artists, 1927.

Freshman Year . Directed by Frank McDonald. United States: Universal, 1938.

Horse Feathers . Directed by Norman Z. McLeod. Performed by Groucho Marx, Chico Marx, Harpo Marx. United States: Paramount, 1932.

That's My Boy . Directed by Roy William Neill. By Norman Krasna and Francis Wallace. Performed by Richard Cromwell and Mae Marsh. United States: Columbia, 1932.

The Freshman . Directed by Fred Newmeyer and Sam Taylor. Performed by Harold Lloyd. United States: Pathe, 1925.

While Thousands Cheer . Directed by Kenny C. Popkin. Performed by Kenny Washington. United States: Million Dollar Productions, 1940.

The Plastic Age . Directed by Wesley Ruggles. Produced by B. P. Schulberg. Performed by Clara Bow, Henry B. Walthall, Donald Keith, David Butler, and Gilbert Roland. United States: Commonwealth, 1925.

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College Days . Directed by Richard Thorpe. Performed by Marceline Day. United States: Tiffany, 1926.

The Spirit of Stanford . Produced by Sam White. Directed by Charles Barton. By Howard J. Green. Performed by Robert Stevens, Frankie Albert, and Kay Harris. United States: Columbia, 1942.

So This Is College . Directed by Sam Wood. United States: MGM, 1929.

Pigskin Parade . Produced by Darryl Francis Zanuck. Directed by David Butler. Performed by Stuart Erwin, Patsy Kelly, Jack Haley, Johnny Downs, Betty Grable, Arline Judge, Dixie Dunbar, Judy Garland, Tony Martin, Fred Kohler, Grady Sutton, Elisha Cook, and Edward Nugent. United States: Twentieth Century-Fox Film Corp., 1936.

Zanuck, D.F. & Butler, D. (1936). Pigskin Parade . United States: 20 th Century Fox.

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